It has been advised by the top online articles in the World as well as the largest online article submission site on the Planet that it is smart to write your online articles as stand alone works.
As somewhat of an online article author myself, well I must state that I; completely agree.
Indeed this also speaks to authors of out-of-print books or perhaps e-Books where each chapter and sub-heading could be an article spanning many different categories.
Since it is impossible to piece them all together the author loses nothing by enjoying both venues simultaneously.
Each article broken out of the larger work allows for more "keywords" in titles, different niche searches and the ability to reach additional clientele and targeted traffic to your website.
I myself have made mistakes previously in listing articles early on that where "Part I, II, III" until I realized how that was defeating my real goals.
Thus I have broken apart articles or essays of 4,000 words into 8-10 articles.
I have taken 250 page e-books and broken these into countless articles.
If you are writing articles that are so large that they need to be broken apart into multiple articles, then rather than numbering them you should make them each stand alone articles.
Therefore, I am going to have to recommend that anyone who wishes to succeed in online article marketing really think hard on this advice.
I think this is good advice and experience to think on with a touch of wisdom in the online article writing domain mixed in.
I hope you think on it.