Hi,

I have a few articles on my site that relate to the work we do in Thailand, or to Thailand itself. I have a writer working with me who is keen to write about lots more points of interest for people who come to our site.

The questions I have are:

1. Do we publish the articles on our site, then wait for them to be spidered to avoid duplicate content issues?

2. I've looked at some article directories that would suit our articles, but to be honest I can't see much traffic being generated from it. What have you found?

3. Do people do this just to get links? I ask because obviously I would like links to our site but if this technique has been abused is it not worth doing anymore?

4. We intend to make our site a very interesting resource for not just people coming to work on our projects but anyone interested in coming to Thailand. We our building a free database of Thai language lessons. We will also include extensive cultural and travel advice, alongside our articles. Is it best to just put the articles on our site and let the search engines find them themselves? Or will publishing them help out long term?

Thanks

keep some articles for your site

disseminate different articles on the article directories.

The article directory articles will link to your site
The  article directory articles will be copied by other people onto their sites and will therefore link to you.

The article directories are used to help build links, not traffic. Links will help boost your SERPs positions

I'm gonna have to agree (yet again) with Northie- the directories just help you get links- not many people actually go there to read articles- ie it won;t leed to much traffic

I would guess most of the traffic that large directories such as ezinearticles receive is from 1) people submitting articles 2) people collecting articles to use as their content on their sites- and if you are using this technique I would assume you are not getting much traffic...which leave me to ask this:

Do any of these "made for directories" articles ever really translate to traffic?

I know a few do..those that get picked up by high traffic sites...for example slashdot or digg (and to a lesser extend SR )...but that has to be a fraction of a percent

what is better? to write a ton of lesser quality articles quickly and hope they transalte into a bunch of links (usually from the same directories) and little traffic........or take your time and try to come up with a 1 or 2 excellent ones and hope high traffic sites pick them up (granted those may not exist for all industries- for example not sure where you would submit them for travel let's say)