When looking at a page where an article is going to be the primary, or only content, what makes it a good page? What are you looking to find on the page and what do you not want to find from an SEO point of view? Would you pay a nominal fee to have your article posted on a particularly good page? If so, what does the page need to have and how much would you be willing to pay for it?
If the point of article posting is to get a backlink, then the main SEO factors are: -- high PR of the page -- as few outbound links on the same page as possible -- the article appearing as high on the page as possible (there should be no irrelevant junk above it) -- ability to set the page Title and <h1> to the article title -- the backlink must be dowollow The high quality and trust level of the site matter a lot tool. If it's a site flooded with unselected low quality articles, many of them linking to "bad neighborhoods," the backlinks will not be worth much.
Outbound links. Hmm. On my site I allow a link in the byline, an addition link at the bottom for "more like this" links, or a facebook link, or whatever. I also allow up to three links in the body of the article itself. The title of the article is placed in an h1 tag, and beyond that the title of the page includes the title of the article, and I even allow for a string of keywords which is placed in the keyword meta tag of that page. Except for the "report" links for reporting TOS or rules violations I have no "nofollow" links on the site at all. Although I am considering changing some of the links in the page footer and the social bookmarking links under each article to nofollow. I would never "nofollow" a customers link. That would be really bad business.