The only real reason that online businesses pour so many resources into article marketing is to get more traffic. That’s why the best web article 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. 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.
We normally want to give our greatest SEO love to our most competitive pages. Those are often the pages that directly generate income. 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.
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. That’s why they came to our article rather than going directly to a store or service provider.
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. That action might be buying or signing up to receive additional information. 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 dilemma we face. 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.