If you can’t put the effort in so that you rank high in the search engines and receive your share of that free traffic, can you still survive?

Yes, it is still possible to survive, there are a number of different ways to get traffic to your site. You can use PPC, (pay per click) or social book marking sites or similar web 2.0 methods. Generally it’s going to cost you as you’ll need to do a lot of advertising to get a good number of visitors to your site.

This is why most people try for the SEO option of getting a high search engine ranking, in the long run, it can work out a lot cheaper if you do it right.

Quality content and good backlinks.