There are a great many things content should dictate - the markup, the layout, and ultimately the total page count. You have a site that has 2k of plaintext, a dozen content images and a contact form, I probably would at most make two pages out of it... You have hundreds of thousands of topics totalling terabytes of data like say... Wikipedia does, there's no limit to how many pages you could have! Blogs are another example where you just keep adding pages of fresh content -- there is no limit or 'perfect number of pages'. It's also another reason I say one should at least TRY and build content FIRST, then mark it up semantically, then style it to create the layout, and only at the end think about screwing around in some goofy paint program to make the graphics to hang on the layout.
I am building a website right now with thousands content pages... Why? I need organic traffic from search engines. If you are trying to make money from Adsense, then you need hundreds of pages if not thousands. If you are doing affiilate marketing, a few pages would work perfectly with good landing pages.
As many pages as necessary to make the site and authority site in Google's eyes! I made a site blueprint yesterday for a potential client wanting to enter a competitive niche - and using LSI keyword analysis, discovered the site will need: home page 7 primary pages 53 article pages Also: about us, contact us, privacy That means he will have to fork out for 64 LSI based static pages on a 3 level deep LSI silo site structure, an integrated blog may also be needed to boost theme - otherwise he will be doing exactly what thousands of other people are doing in the niche - building leaky-bucket sites and endless back-link building - and he will be throwing his money away like most of the other site owners chasing top rankings in this $35 to $67 CPC niche Half-hearted site-building on the now fiercely competitive Internet is doomed to failure
it depend on your site material if you are giving more packages and services the pages must be more and if you giving limit amount of service then it mighty be less in page.
Scraped articles, spun articles, scraped news content, YouTube videos, etc. Won't get you much traffic or Adsense money - will just get your site blocked from Adsense program
A typical business Website would have at least 3 pages i.e. the homepage, about us page, and the contact us page.
I totally agreed with pxgfx, it's all depend on the site. I have a project on a travel site and the owner want to only 7 to 8 pages of the sites and I think 8 pages are perfect for this site.
It would depend on the type of site -- but usually you would have primary/root pages and then perhaps many, many content pages, depending on the site. I would disagree with others with regards to having as many pages as possible. Page count alone does not make a good site, it is quality of content.
There is a tendency towards less pages and more scrolling down one large / long page. E.g. http://www.soupagency.it/#soup
Both of the points you make are valid If you are wanting to get top Google rankings for anything other than the most uncompetitive search terms then you have to thoroughly cover the topic in depth - i.e. build an authority site - and preferably use a 3 level deep silo architecture of home page, primary pages, article pages to support the primary pages