Best SEO Secrets Pro

In a recent article I wrote about the conflict we face in trying to meet two objectives in content marketing.  In a nutshell, the problem is that we frequently want to use links in our articles to our “money pages” for the purposes of optimizing for search engines, but the readers are not yet at the purchasing stage in terms of their frame of mind as they are busy gathering information (the reason they found our syndicated article)..  In that article, I coupled that complexity with another related issue:  With good website design, each page should have a single purpose.  That purpose is to satisfy our visitor’s desire. a prospect to our money page until they already want to go there–in other words, they’re ready to buy.]

I did not offer a solution in that original article.  Simply bringing the problem to the attention of article marketers was my goal in that previous piece.  Today, I’ll go that one additional step and give one answer to the quandary.

There are actually at least two solutions to the dilemma.  The first option is to ignore the rule of website design for marketing purposes and have our landing pages attempt to offer two different objectives allowing our readers to satisfy their information seeking and provinding an opportunity to buy the product or service from the same page.  Another solution to our dilemma is to include two different kinds of links from our distributed articles.  One link option or type will take the clicker to a landing page dedicated entirely to providing valuable information and an opt-in form encouraging the visitor to get even more information by signing up for our list; the other type of link leads to our “money page,” primarily for the purpose of search engine optimization.  In these cases, our anchor text must make clear what to expect on the landing page.

When presented with these two options, I recommend the second.  Allow me to elaborate on why I endorse this approach and what the respective landing page for each type of link will contain.

Recall that the readers of our syndicated article want to gather information.  If we want to entice them to click a link to actually come to our site, we must promise even more information that is pertient to them.  I trust that I don’t have to tell you that we always must deliver what we promise our prospects.  Thus, our article marketing content must be interesting, accurate and informative, but it must leave the impression that we still have more to tell them.  We must subtly persuade them that our site will provide all the remaining necessary information, and we make sure that link delivers them to a content page.

We also want to move them along that decision making continuum by implying that there is a product or service that will provide the ultimate solution to their current problem.  By including that information, we have an opportunity to link to one of our selling pages largely for the purpose of search engine optimization.

It is always easier to logically include both types of links within our articles if we syndicate directly to websites that are within our general niche category; in those cases we can make our links contextual within the article, itself.  However, if we limit our article distribution to article directories, we can still accomplish our task by cleverly using a well written resource box to provide the rationale for linking to both kinds of pages.

On our content landing page, we focus upon bringing our readers much closer to the buying decision end of the decision making continuum.  Remember that the visitors have already been persuaded to accept our initial offer by clicking on our link, so they are in an agreeable frame of mind.  We can now treat them as serious prospects and ramp up our selling strategy a bit.  We shall offer them a link to the page where they can actually buy, but we focus primarily on getting them to take one more small step by asking for the contact information in exchange for the promise of even more valuable content. 

We establish ourselves as experts in our distributed content, so we are “selling” that expertise to our readers.  On the linked page, we’re selling our credibility and integrity.  After they have signed onto our mailing list, we can actually begin selling our product by building our relationship with our new prospects and then more blatantly recommending our product or service.

The second type of link from our article marketing content leads directly to a product page.  The primary purpose of that link is increasing our SEO, so we must be especially careful to research and have anchor text that is a long tail keyword with implicit commercial intent.

As marketers, all of our efforts are toward increasing revenue through a sale.  As writers we must make the sale without disrupting the prose of our content.  So our first objective is to convince the article readers that they need more information, and that the necessary information can be found by clicking our link.  Second we sell the search engine spiders on the accuracy of our description of our selling page by making sure that the anchor text and the page match in meaningful ways.

Technorati Tags: anchor text, article marketing, external link, link building, linking, linking text, traffic, website design