Putting it in the most direct way possible, we put a lot of effort into article marketing in hopes of achieving one simple objective: Get more traffic!

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, 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. 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. 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. A basic marketing principle of 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 for our mailing list in order 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 absolutely obey the marketing rule, we can’t possibly optimize our most important pages and satisfy the human reader of our article–can we?

That is the seemingly unwinnable choice that faces us. Should we focus our article marketing efforts on search engine optimization 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.