Lately I have been concerned about, and have been hearing more and more about duplicate content on the internet. Particularly if you run your own online business like I do, you definitely want to have good quality content on your site to attract not only visitors and buyers, but to get the attention of the search engines that look for unique content. Article writing is one of the best and most cost-effective ways to put content on your site, and to market your online business these days. The problem is that the same, or very similar content is showing up more and more on different web pages, much to the search engines' chagrin - and they will penalize your site for it! Here are some ways to write and use articles in such a way that you can skirt the duplicate content penalty:

As far as article writing goes, there are different ways to get content onto your site. You can write your own articles, you can hire a ghostwriting service to write articles for you that you can put your own name to, or you can use other people's articles on your website and blog to add fresh content to your site. I'm going to discuss each of these in greater detail so that you can compare each, and learn some new tips on how to avoid duplicate content using these methods.

If you choose to write your own articles, you are doing the best thing for your business and for the search engines because you are making your site stand out from the rest by making it your own. You may find it difficult to come up with your own content, but I find that the more you learn about your business, or website topic, the more you will have to write about. It's easy in internet marketing to come up with a topic, as the learning truly never ends in this field! Your task becomes even easier when you consider writing one original article, submitting it, and then changing or re-writing it. There is nothing wrong with modifying your own articles and re-submitting them!

It's true that other people may use your original article on their websites and make you wonder about duplicate content. You may also wonder about submitting your same, original article to thousands of publishers through article distribution services. At first, this may seem the ultimate compliment to you that your article is being used, and so it should be! You also want your articles to be displayed in multiple places to grow you back links. But I have heard of instances where your article shows up in thousands of different places, the search engines see it as duplicate content, and then suddenly you no longer have a listing for your site in relation to your own article! The fact is, duplicate content cannot really be avoided on the net, and you should only get banned if you have a spam site with no valuable content. These are things I wouldn't really worry about.

Ghostwriting services can make your life easier by writing good articles for you for a reasonable price. This is a good option if you want to send out many articles at once with your name and links attached. It saves you time, energy, and work, and the articles put out are usually good quality articles. The problem is that many other people might have very similar content to yours. A way to avoid duplicate content here is if you just change a few things about the articles you get. For example, you may want to change the article title, or add headers to separate paragraphs. You can change some of the wording around, mix up the paragraphs a little, or even bold or italicize some text to make it more unique.

If you use other people's articles on your site, it may be best to ask for the author's permission to change the article slightly as well, or to simply quote bits and pieces of the article, surrounded by your own commentary. I personally like to use other people's articles on my blog to show that I am not the only authority on the subject areas in my niche. On days when I have writer's block, this method comes in handy as well. Lately, I have been trying to avoid duplicate content on my blog by adding an introductory paragraph before posting the article by another author in its original form. I haven't yet added concluding remarks following the author resource box, but this is also an excellent way to avoid duplicate content and I plan to do this in the near future.

Hopefully these article-writing tips will help you avoid the nasty duplicate content penalty. No one wants their site to be banned from the search engines, so it's a good idea to write your own articles, make slight changes to other articles if you have permission to do so, and add an introduction and conclusion to your blog if adding other's articles to your blog.