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.  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/or, alternatively, the major search engines can notice our article link and give greater important to that landing page on our site.  This latter option leads to more traffic, eventually, by sending us visitors who have found our page in the search engine results. 

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.  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 usually at a stage of beginning information gathering.  Indeed, it is because they are gathering information that they found our article in the first place.

Now, hang onto those two competing states of mind for a moment, while we consider how we construct pages on a business website.  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.  Whether that action is to buy our product, sign up for our mailing list or scratch their noses, we focus all our content on that page toward achieving that single objective.  So, if we absolutely obey the marketing rule, we can’t possibly optimize the most prized pages on the site and simultaneously satisfy the human reader of our article–can we?

That is the seemingly unwinnable choice that faces us.  Should we focus our article marketing efforts 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?  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.