Google seems to avoid stale content. Give the Googlebot something new to read on each visit and my experience has shown that it will be back often.
If you're a "little guy", just getting ready to launch a new site, I have two suggestions-

1. Spend some time building the site before you start publishing it. So many people rush to put their "home page" out there hoping to get indexed quickly. This is a big mistake in my opinion. Make sure you have at least 10 - 20 pages of unique content before you launch your site. You will be much better off if you can have more content right at launch.

2. If you want the site to actually draw traffic, plan to add new content as often as possible. I try and add a minimum of 5 new pages a week to my primary sites. Obviously the more pages the better, but I'm not a full time SEO or web designer and have to be realistic. Set a schedule to add content that's do-able for you and stick to it.

If you follow these suggestions at the end of year one you'll have a site with 250 - 300 pages of original content. While surely not the largest on the web, if you target your keywords well in your copy a site of this size should help you start drawing some relevant traffic from the search engines. Keep this up and after 3 years you will have a site with close to 1,000 pages that should be drawing a fair amount of relevant search engine traffic.

Did I mention Google likes fresh content?