A time-honored way of getting one-way inbound links to your website is to distribute content, usually articles, for other websites to publish in exchange for a backlink. Most often, backlink is included in an "author's resource box," which is a brief "about author" paragraph promoting author's site.

Content distribution has usually been thought of as a website promotion strategy rather than an SEO or link-building strategy. But there are good reasons for adding content distribution to your SEO toolkit.

SEO Benefits of Distributing Content vs. Reciprocal Linking Alone

* Links come faster. You send an email with your article to a relevant website owner. That's it. No adding links to your site and then checking and re-checking for compliance. That means you can get more links from time and resources you spend on link-building.

* Links are not always available through reciprocal linking. Many website owners simply refuse to do reciprocal linking. Content distribution is one way to reach this large segment of website owners.

* Links are one-way. Many SEO experts believe that reciprocal links may be "dampened" by search engines; i.e., they will not help you rank as high as one-way links. Of course, reciprocal links are still valuable, there's a just a question of how valuable they really are.

* Links per page are fewer. Many SEO experts believe that higher number of links per page, less SEO value each link has. When a website publishes an article, author's backlink is often only live link to another website on that page.

Distinct Non-SEO Benefits of Distributing Content

What makes content distribution a truly special method of link building is that it's only method where non-SEO benefits may even outweigh SEO benefits:

* Website building. If you create special content for your link-building campaign, you can publish it on your site. As a general rule, more content your site has, more search engine traffic it will receive. Just publish article and get it indexed in search engines before distributing it, which should help you to outrank your republishers in search engines for that same content.

* Traffic generation. The links in distributed content generate traffic in form of highly qualified leads: people who liked what you had to say. Distributing content gets you traffic even when it doesn't get you a link. If your article gets picked up by a large-circulation email newsletter, you will get a flood of highly qualified traffic.

* Authority. Distributing content is only linking campaign method that can make recipient website and its owners appear authoritative. There are thousands of internet gurus who owe their lucrative reputations entirely to articles they've distributed.

Newbie Myth 1: The "Duplicate content penalty."

Some webmasters worry that if content on their sites is suddenly on hundreds of other sites, search engines will inflict a "duplicate content penalty." Why is this concern unjustified?

* If this were true, every major newspaper and news portal website would now be de-indexed from search engines, since they all carry "duplicate content" from news wires such as

Reuters and Associated Press.

* Thousands of self-promoting internet gurus have proven that distributing content is an effective method of improving search engine rank.

* Even more thousands of content websites have proven that republishing this content does not carry any search engine penalty.

True, first website to publish an article often seems to be favored by search engines, ranking higher for same content in searches than higher-PageRank pages with same content. But "duplicate" pages do show up in search engine results, even if lower than original site. Meanwhile, reprint content has no effect on ranking of a site's other pages.

The only duplicate content penalty is for duplication of content across pages of a single website. Meanwhile, there is a sort of "copyright theft" penalty, whereby someone who copies content without permission can be manually removed from search engine indexes out of respect for Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But that penalty is only for flagrant theft, not minor mistakes in attributing reprint content.

Newbie Myth 2: The goal is to get in article clearinghouse websites.

There are over 100 popular, high-traffic websites that act as clearinghouses for content made available for redistribution. These websites include isnare.com, amazines.com, and goarticles.com.

Many novice content-distributors are upset when article clearinghouse websites, with tens of thousands of articles each with a backlink, pass negligible PageRank. But point of distributing content to those websites is for other website owners to find your content and put it on their websites--not to get a backlink directly from clearinghouse website (though this is sometimes an unexpected bonus).

Plus, to maximize PageRank-passing links, you also have to submit articles to website owners individually. It's not a small amount of work. But there's no substitute for a polite, individually crafted email recommending a website owner complement his or her existing articles with one you've written.

Myth 3: Any content will do.