Acommon strategy for content marketer is syndicating what they have created. There are many ways to do this and many things you should avoid doing if you are syndicating your content.

Traditionally the idea is to write a piece of content and have it published on a site with a better rank than your own.  In exchange for the article you are given a link back to your site.  A good site will pass page rank and link juice, conversely a lower ranking site publishing your content with good links does you little good.  This can be a powerful link building technique, depending on how well your piece is written as this will determine who is willing to publish it.   Developing solid relationships with high authority sites is crucial for any link building strategy.

Article directories offer you a place to publish your work, and most of them will give you a link at the end back to your website.  Contrary to what some might tell you this technique has very little SEO value.  The engines have devalued links from these sites and your article is more likely to get scraped or plagiarized than it is to be picked up and reposted by a site that can pass any value to you with a link.   Overall this is a waste of time.

A common syndication practice is posting on your site and distributing the same work to other sites, however you could run into a duplicate content issue and have yours filtered.  Be careful if you decide to do this!   If you are going to re post you content verbatim, make sure you have good links back to your original article, not just to your website.  Google also recommends that you “ask those who use your syndicated material to use the noindex meta tag”.  While this technique might drive some temporary traffic it will not do much in the way of long term SEO benefits.  Think like Google would.  Why is this site posting identical content all over the place?

If you’re trying to outsmart the engines you’ll have to do better.

When you are attempting to build readership, and even after you have, social syndication can be a great way to reach the maximum audience with one piece of content.  Posting links to your articles on social sites is a great way to get your content viewed and build links!  If people find your content helpful they are going to tell others (generally via linking to it).  Social networking is a great way to build readership and will invariably contribute to your rankings.

It goes without saying at this point that at the end of the day, good links are what we are after. 

The best attractor of good links is good content.  It’s said over and over because it is so true:  Write for people not for search engines!  Certainly we must consider some on page SEO factors, but good writing will always fare better overall than tricky writing.  Links are one of the most important factors in SEO and the best way to get them is to share good content, not trying to outsmart Google.