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.  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. 

Trying to maximize our results from those two methods causes a problem.  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.  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. 

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 any given page should be directed toward moving the visitor to one and only one action.  That action might be buying or it might be 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, we can’t possibly optimize the most prized pages on the site and simultaneously satisfy the reader–can we?

That is the dilemma we face.  Should we direct our article marketing strategy on search engine optimization or on sending our readers to a page 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.