The problem starts when you have written a lot of articles over the years and you put these on your site. They have probably been grabbed by other site builders from these article directories. This may be content that you had created entirely on your own but because you submitted them to these directories they are now all over the place. Some marketers sell these articles telling you that all you have to do is ad your info to them as the author but these articles were probably given to so many people that unless you rewrite them word for word that these will be seen as duplicate content.

So how do we put together a site where the search engines will see them as unique without duplicate content? First what you do is to choose all the keywords that will be used for your site. Then you will make use of a service that acts as a ghostwriter. I've seen sites that offer 100 articles each being at least 400 words for as little as $5 each but these may end up being article that were put together by some garbage software that are not readable by humans. With these you will need to rewrite them so that a visitor to your site will be able to understand them.

You can also find individual ghostwiters using a service like Elance or Guru. Now when doing this expect to may a little more than these junk article sites charge. I would first look at the other listings and see what the going rates are. You can see what other companies are offering for a ghostwriter and what ghostwriters are offering to charge for creating an article for people. I would start out by posting an ad describing what you are looking for and then ask for the ghostwrites to make offers to you in regard to how long this will take and what they would charge.

When looking at these offers I would keep in mind that most people will ask for a little more than they are used to getting. With this in mind you can then take the first offer and write back to the person with a starting bid of lets say 2/3's. If you just went ahead and agreed to the first price they offered to do this for then you would probably find in the future that you paid a little too much Just as long as you don't make some ridiculous offer you should be able to meet the ghostwriter at some price that you both feel comfortable with

As long as you only put these articles on your site then you can never be accused of using duplicate content. This may be more than you initially were looking at in regards to setting up a site but look at it this way. This will save you a lot of money that you would have to pay services for submitting your site to the top search engines because of this you will get high organic results from the search engines.