March 1, 2010

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 flourish, and it’s why the top article directories do not go begging for content.

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. 

Unfortunately those two ways of achieving our single objective are not always complimentary.  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.  With those pages, we try to reach search engine users who are already in a mindset to buy. 

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.  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 scratch their noses, we focus all our energy on that page toward achieving that single objective.  So, if we absolutely obey the marketing rule, 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 dilemma we face.  Should we direct our article marketing strategy on SEO or on providing a landing page for our readers that will give them what they actually want at this stage?  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.