Quality vs SEO

[Tster]

What do you think is better, a quality article or SEO article (I'd say something in the middle)?

Do articles with SEO sell better? and if so, how much should be used/done?

[jak]

These elements shouldn't contradict each other. Take a look at recent articles in this site's blog.

[Tster]

These elements shouldn't contradict each other. Take a look at recent articles in this site's blog.

I feel though, when you try to optimize an article for search engines, you add a lot of the same words - or add phrases unnecessarily. This makes the word length of the article not an accurate representation of the actual, unique content, degrading the quality.

EDIT: I had a look at the blog articles, found an extract which describes my dilemma:
"In fact, paying too much attention to keyword density often leads to keyword stuffing which looks terrible to human readers and is becoming increasingly commonly penalized by Google."

[jak]

That's right. SEO is changing as Google changes its algorithms.