Confronting the Delimma in Article Distribution
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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 never go begging for content.
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/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 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.
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. 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 human reader–can we?
That is the dilemma we face. Should we focus our article marketing efforts on SEO or on sending our readers to a page 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?
We must consider these options carefully in both our article syndication decisions and our copywriting decisions within the website itself.