With enough quality backlinks, you can get pages ranked well even if they have very little text. It is a good practice to try to include at least 250-300 words of text on any important search engine landing pages. That helps get other keywords into your content, giving you a chance to rank better for a wider variety of keyword combinations. Provided that the content is all related to your target keywords, more text definitely is better.
I dont think there is, some pages require less text and forcing more onto it for seo purposes when the text would not compliment the page isn't a good idea.
a page can have as little as 10 words and still rank good but for maximizing on page seo use 300+ words
Yeah, I have been trying to aim for 300+ and have been doing so, so far. I have also read that if you put the other pages in a directory, being the target keyword, and having the keyword in your document name that this can help. Something like; www.yoursite.com/index.htm www.yoursite.com/keyword/keyword_things.htm www.yoursite.com/keyword/keyword_accessories.htm www.yoursite.com/keyword/keyword_something_else.htm This is how I have started laying out one of my new sites that I want to rank well. Does this sort of thing help, hinder, or make no difference in practice?
You could determine the quality of page by it's useful and interesting content and the use of targeted keywords as anchor text within the content.