• By Chris Kennelly
• Published 09/10/2009
• Article Writing

There are a large number of sources that you can use to obtain valid and useful content for your website, this can be via the article directory, or even offline sources such as newspapers, books and magazines. There some important issues that need to be considered before using any material regardless of the source of content that you wish to utilise for your website, the main point being that all due credit should be given to the original author where necessary. This will avoid any unnecessary copyright infringement, and let’s face it, it really is fair and ethical to recognise the works of others. In using the article directory for link building purposes, the gist of the exercise is to publish a high quality article, that will be republished by others and therefore provide a number of back links to your website. The benefit of this is that you will increase the authority of your site in the eyes of the search engines, due to the number of links pointing to your site, and whilst this is a valuable benefit, the additional advantage is the increased traffic that will come to the site, not only from the article directory but from the other sources where your works are republished.

Another main benefit of the article directory, of which there are thousands by th

e way, is that once your article is approved for publication it will remain there for as long as you wish it to remain. Therefore the more content and articles that you submit your published or written content, the more links you will be building to your website, and if you are running your site as a business this can be the make or break for the income generation opportunities of your site. In addition to this there are certain directories that are focused on specific topics which may well be more relevant to your website than just the general article directory with millions of topics and articles. If you can find these then you will establish more relevant links that will definitely help in the search engine ranking of your site, as well as the authority that these search engines place upon your site in your specific niche.

The article directory also serves as a source of inspiration when you are looking for topics and content, although this is where you will want to tread lightly and not copy the content verbatim, as this really is infringement as well as what some might term as plagiarism. Besides these issues the search engines will also not see your content as original and will therefore not really place any relevance upon your site. In essence if you have taken the time to rewrite the content, but you do not change it significantly enough you have really wasted your time.