Question: The importance of an article

On a scale from 1-10 how important are the articles with relations to get a good search engine rank?

 

A definite 10. 
If you read my report on articles (free to my newsletter subscribers) you will see that I rank them very highly indeed.  Articles can make or break your site.  Of course incoming links are the other hugely important factor to good rankings, but read my report and see how your articles can help in this way too.