It is not big secret that article marketing is great for SEO and traffic. However, if you have to keep writing a post for your blog and a post each for 20 article directories, can you really get through the writing?

The answer is to ‘repurpose’ content. In short, write a post, publish it to your blog and then syndicate it to various article websites, making changes as required so that it becomes a stand alone piece.

However, with talk of Google duplicate content filters in the past many people are frightened of this. But they shouldn’t be! Late in 2010 Google updated this filter and it now works properly.

It used to be that Google would gather together all websites with the same article / post and only include the highest PageRank website in the results. This was their arbitrary way of reducing loads of very similar content to just the one result. A great idea for people searching for content, but blatantly often unfair on the original source.

But with the death of PageRank (how else do you explain 1 PageRank update in the last year?) and Google moving onwards to a fairer system, it seems they have hit upon a method that works.

What seems to happen now is that they are paying more attention to links. If the same content appears on 10 websites and they all link to the same website, which is also displaying that content, then it is the 11th website that appears above the rest!

So if you re-purpose content and include a link back n your biography, you are forming this web of links and should be credited as the original source.

If you want to know more about this, have a read through the set of posts I wrote about duplicate content over on my web design blog. It follows an experiment I ran last November and my own page is still the first result of almost 100 results returned.

Building traffic to a blog is essential and one of the great ways of doing that is through article writing. This process, along with guest posting, works on 2 ways.

But to begin with, you need to do your research. Before starting to write a random collection of articles that you can submit to you favourite collection of article directories and blogs, you need to prepare the groundwork.

Targeted Writing, Not Mass Waffle!
Just writing, writing and writing is not the best way forward. It might, long term, increase your Page Rank, but this is just an indicator of the trust your website has gained from Google and does not affect the traffic that you will receive.

Instead, you need to research keyword phrases and write about them. Use tools such as the Google Keyword selector tool and type in a couple of keywords that relate to your website. From this you can see the volumes of traffic that are associated with your preferred keywords and then pick some that are probably not that competitive and you might be able to perform well with.

Find The Longer Keywords
You should be able to dig around these keywords to find longer phrases that include these keywords, which have probably got less traffic and less competition. It is these longer keywords that you should start on, as by default as you work on the longer ones, your ranking for the shorter ones also starts to improve.

Not Just Search Engine Optimisation
But, this is only the first aspect of article writing for traffic. As you write and submit articles you are spreading your incoming links far and wide and it is these that the search engines reward you for with more traffic.

There is a second, huge, advantage of article writing. If you are submitting also to the high quality, high traffic article directories rather than just the low quality directories that exist only for page rank, there is a huge benefit that you might initially overlook.

Real People Read Your Writing
And this benefit is in actual traffic arriving from these article directories and blogs you are guest posting on. One article alone that I wrote a few months ago still sends me 1 or 2 visitors every day, just from one article directory.

For this to work you have to submit to quality site, produce useful and well written pieces that provide some valuable information that the visitors to the sites want to read, can find and then tempt the readers over to your site to discover more about what you have to say.

It Is Not Easy, But It Works!
No one has ever said it is easy, but it is possible to use article writing to increase your website optimisation and also directly increase the traffic to your website, if you take your time to research the subject and then write a good article.

It can be wonderfully rewarding to start seeing a trail of visitors arriving at your website because of your hard work. So try it now!

Are you investing ample of time and effort writing articles? Do they be successful? Are they a waste of time? Have you ever measured what you get back from them? I have, and I can share with you my results.

With so loads of site owners putting a load of effort into writing articles, what evidence is there that this technique actually does any good? Well, the aim is new targeted traffic arriving onto your website, and for this we might have direct traffic and search engine traffic.

Direct Visitors
Direct traffic will arrive in the form of people who have read our articles arriving onto our sites. Given the time and effort it takes to write an article (not that much, really), then a handful of visitors per article would be good. Though you have to pay someone $10 to write each article, as long as the subject of the article is closely related to your site, they will be targeted traffic.

Looking at my most successful article of last month, in the 3 weeks since it was published, it has been viewed 376 times, producing 24 clicks in excess of to my website. Those 24 targeted visitors would have price a fortune through PPC systems, so I am quids in there. And that is only 1 reprint of the article, which has also be reprinted by some of those readers.

Search Engines
But what about the search engine benefits? Well, that article has just been about for 21 days, so it is too early to see any changes, but I also did a batch of articles 15 months ago on a new keyword phrase. That phrase was one that I had not worked on before and since then, I have left alone.

Before I worked on it, my websites were nowhere to be found on the terms. After a handful of articles I had reached 2nd and 3rd position on Google with 2 separate websites. And then I left them alone and didn’t do any further work on the term.

Well, 15 months on and occasionally I still check the keyword phrase and a couple of related phrases. It has become a benchmark of mine – the web sites still hover between 2nd and 4th places on the first page of Google, occasionally one will drop further down and then make a quick climb back to these positions.

So, for the sake of maybe a dozen articles submitted to a site that specialises in distributing them for SEO benefits, my two sites made it to a good search engine position and have remained there ever since. In fact, on one of the alternative names, I am now even in top position.

My experience is good
My experience of article writing is that with certain sources you could get ample of people reading your articles and then visiting your website and other sources could really improve your search engine rankings.

What over that could you want? Article writing really does be successful!