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/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. 

Unfortunately those two ways of achieving our single objective are not always complimentary to each other.  The pages that we want to optimize in the search engines may not be the same pages to which we would ideally send our article readers.  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–or at worst in the state of mind in which they just need a little shove to make that final decision. 

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.  A basic marketing principle of 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 signing up 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 obey the marketing rule to the letter, it is logically impossible to both optimize our most important pages and satisfy the human reader–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 give them what they actually want at this stage?  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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