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 syndicated article help us in this way in two potential 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 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.
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.
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.
Now, hang onto those two competing states of mind for a moment, while we consider how we construct pages on a business website. A basic marketing principle of 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 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 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–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 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.
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