The company website's finally up and running for all to see online. The design agency did a great job and management are happy with the end result. Now you can sit back and wait for your visitors to start pouring in. Job done right? Err, not exactly.

That was the first stage completed now you've got to focus on how to drive traffic to your site and keep visitors coming back. Gone are the days when you can launch a website and traffic starts pouring in straight away. With somewhere in the region of 8 million pages added to the world wide web a day you're going to have to make sure your website stands out above others.

Most experts will tell you that SEO (search engine optimisation) and/or PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns are the best way to drive traffic to your site. In our humble opinion that's only a partial truth. Search engine rankings through SEO are difficult to attain for small organisations and require constant work to maintain high listings. These can be influenced by factors such as keyword/phrase density and repetition, quality and quantity of in-bound links and other related factors. We wouldn't say don't concentrate on improving your search engine ranking but, at the same time, don't view that as a one stop solution.

Similarly, PPC campaigns have a number of drawbacks, particularly for small organisations. The cost of running a campaign can be expensive in the long run, any traffic driven to the site stops once you finish the campaign and clickthroughs from visitors don't necessarily translate into increased sales but you have to pay for the cost of each clickthrough regardless.

PPC campaigns can be very effective if approached correctly but for most organisations with a limited budget we'd recommend avoiding PPC. Similarly SEO is an ongoing process and one that the website owner has to devote time to. We don't dismiss either option when discussing marketing tactics with our clients. What we do however is explain how time consuming and/or financially consuming both approaches can be. We recommend SEO but caution against expecting immediate results.

So how do I drive traffic to my site then?

There's no easy answer but from our experience visitors love content and engaging with websites. With that in mind a few things we would recommend to drive traffic to your site:

• A blog - people are suckers for information and a blog is a perfect way to keep your site updated and provides a more 'human' face for your visitors to engage with.
• Website links - high traffic sites such as Digg provide links to content on various websites. Providing a way for users to link to your content and share that content with others means the potential for higher visitor footfall.
• Social media integration - Got video? Link up via YouTube. Images? Host them through Flickr. Looking to network? Try LinkedIn or Plaxo. The options are endless but the potential is obvious.

In our humble opinion, unless you've got a large budget to devote to PPC avoid it until you're ready to make that expenditure and stick to SEO and keeping your website up to date with fresh content that users can share with others.