Quite simply, we put a lot of effort into article marketing in hopes of achieving one simple objective: Get more traffic!

Our syndicated article help us in this way in two potential ways.  First, readers might click the links contextually embedded within our articles or within the resource box at the article’s end, and, second, search engine spiders will find our link and assign greater import to the linked page within our site, thereby eventually providing us with visitors who come from searches. 

Unfortunately those two ways of achieving our single objective are not always complimentary to each other.  The pages on our site to which we might want to send the article readers may not be our most desired pages for maximizing our search optimization resources.  Let me explain this problem in a little more detail.

Often we pay the most SEO attention to pages that generate revenue directly.  We are optimizing, in those cases, for searchers who are in a buying state of mind. 

Our distributed article readers are not yet in they buying frame; instead they are often in the very early phases of information gathering.  That’s why they came to our article rather than going directly to a store or service provider.

Let’s balance those two visitor mental frames against the way we typically sculpt a page on a business site.  One fundamental rule of marketing that applies to a good website design for a business is that each page within our site should be constructed in a way that contributes to creating only one action on the part of the prospect.  That action might be buying or it might be signing up for our mailing list in order to receive additional information (that we may hope, in turn, to use to move them closer to deciding upon our product or service).  So, if we absolutely obey the marketing rule, it is logically impossible to both optimize our most important pages and satisfy the reader of our article–can we?

That is the seemingly unwinnable choice that faces us.  Should we direct our article marketing strategy on SEO or on providing a landing page for our readers that will offer them what they truly desire at their current stage of decision making (or procrastination, in some cases)?  Should we incorporate two objectives within a single page on our site, or ought we make a choice to abide by common sense marketing principles?

As we develop our overall article syndication strategy and the tactics of writing a single article, we must be attentive to these competing options.