EHow and Article Submission Guidelines

What is the SEO friendly way of doing it?

[webtekcc]

Some of my competitors outrank me because they have links from ehow.com. So I would like links from there too. But how do I get them? I tried to become a writer through Demand Media, but my application got rejected.

Do I have to use an article submission service somewhere that gets the articles on ehow... or some broker place that hooks link seekers up with ehow writers? Same thing for squidoo, hubpages, etc.

In addition, would you submit one article to many places like Ezine, GoArticles, ArticleDashboard, etc. or 1 unique article to each. And would you put that same article on your website or is that not good.
Just worried about google's duplicate content policies and not wanting to upset anyone if my same article can be found different places around the Internet.

[mbelmont]

Are you sure they're outranking you because of those specific backlinks from eHow? Could be other factors that are giving them an advantage. I was under the impression eHow used nofollows anyway, and thus they wouldn't necessarily be passed any link juice from eHow.

I post the same article to multiple article websites, but never post that article (without serious modification) on my own website. Some say this doesn't matter for duplicate content if you publish it first, but I tend to think it's better to err on the side of caution if you are trying to go with a fully white hat strategy for a website.

[not2easy]

ehow linked to several of my pages - on their own. I didn't ask for it or submit anywhere. They send some traffic. If you make a site that answers questions that people ask or solve a common problem you will see natural backlinks showing up.

[webtekcc]

Actually on these ehow pages there was a mix of do-follow with no-follow and my competitors actually got a do-follow link.

It's very possible ehow linked to these sites on their own as you described not2easy. A good example of natural backlinking when there is great content... thanks!