Article length for seo/article syndication?

When it comes to length vs. quality, it is not an either/or proposition if you want to be syndicated in the places that will do you the most good.

It's BOTH...

You see, in order to have a longer article which is also high-quality enough to garner interest from publishers, you have to widen your scope and cover a topic more thoroughly.

The old "5 Tips to Do Something", 4-500 word filler article is so easy to either write yourself or hire cheaply that a lot of serious publishers won't even consider paying for them with links.

EDIT: FreeMeal, you are right about one thing. If forced to choose between length and quality, quality wins every time.

Some of my articles are under 1,000 words. Many are well over.

Longer articles are better for SEO (by all accounts) and for syndication, generally. There's not much "compromise".

However, it's very, very difficult to get syndicated articles which were "obviously written for SEO". They tend not to read nearly well enough. I think about SEO (sometimes) for the titles, and that's all.

Ezine Articles submission software can be relied on automatically to reject any article whose "keyword density" reaches 2% (definitely too high!), but I never count them, myself.

You're going to use your main keyword a few times in an article anyway: it's impossible not to. And "LSI keywords" are just all the related stuff you discuss in an article, too. Again, it's impossible not to. There's no need to look them up and "make a feature of them", and doing so will only make things harder for yourself and/or for a writer, and detract from the outcome.

The best SEO (by far!) comes from syndication to relevant sites. And you don't need consciously to "do SEO" at all for that to happen. All you need is articles written for syndication.

In my experience, it seldom is effective for acceptable conversions to have articles out of the range of 800-1200 words. This seems to be about the optimal length for both publisher and readers' expectations. There really is much more to writing than just stringing some words together with proper grammar, sentence structure and correct spelling, although these areas are actually where most writers experience their failure to launch.

Mastery of the basics must be met with niche-dependent nuances of syntax, style, imagery, idioms, terminology, and often even jargon or humor to make a connection with the reader. And when a reader comes away with a feeling of experiencing the topic, rather than having merely read it, you have achieved liftoff. This effect would be very difficult to achieve with shorter articles, and longer articles most likely would not be considered for publication. In addition, a well-written article often has SEO benefits as a by-product.