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 never lack business, and it’s why the top article directories never lack fresh 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, 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.  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.

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 (or perform whatever our desired, money-making action happens to be). 

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.  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 signing up to receive additional information.  So, if we obey the marketing rule to the letter, it is logically impossible to both optimize our most important pages and 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 offer 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.