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

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.

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. I’ll try to explain the contradiction with a bit of elaboration.

We normally want to give our greatest SEO love to our most competitive pages. Those are often the pages that directly generate income. With those pages, we try to reach search engine users who are already in a mindset to buy (or perform whatever our desired, money-making action happens to be).

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. One fundamental rule of marketing that applies to a good website design for a business is that any given page should be directed toward moving the visitor to one and only one action. Whether that action is to buy our product, sign up for our mailing list or pet their dogs, we focus all our energy on that page toward achieving that single end. So, if we obey the marketing rule to the letter, it is logically impossible to both 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 direct our article marketing strategy on SEO or on sending our readers to a page 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?

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