The only real reason that online businesses pour so many resources into article marketing is to get more traffic.  That’s why the better Internet writing services never lack business, and it’s why the top article directories never go begging for content.

Our articles accomplish this in one (or both) of two ways.  On the one hand, we can receive visitors directly from those articles when the readers click a link in our resource (or author’s) box, 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. 

Trying to maximize our results from those two methods causes a problem.  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.  I’ll try to explain the contradiction with a bit of elaboration.

Often we pay the most SEO attention to pages that generate revenue directly.  With those pages, we try to reach search engine users who are already in a mindset to buy. 

On the other hand, the readers of our syndicated articles are, typically, at a much earlier stage in the decision making process.  They are often in the very early phases of information gathering.  Indeed, it is because they are gathering information that they found our article in the first place.

Let’s balance those two visitor mental frames against the way we typically sculpt a page on a business site.  A basic marketing principle of good website design for a business is that any given page should be directed toward moving the visitor to one and only one action.  That action might be buying or signing up for our mailing list in order to receive additional information.  So, if we obey the marketing rule to the letter, it is logically impossible to both optimize our most important pages and satisfy the human reader of our article–can we?

That is the dilemma we face.  Should we focus our article marketing efforts on search engine optimization 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 abide by the simple, common sense marketing rule, or should we magically try to successfully incorporate two disparate objectives within this single site of the page?

We must consider these options carefully in both our article syndication decisions and our copywriting decisions within the website itself.

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