"Believe it or not, many webmasters here have managed to get their websites on top of the search engines in various keywords without spending a dime to achieve million or so pageviews.
We don't do PPC ever; we don't buy text links on other websites but we are well placed in not one but hundreds of well-trafficked keywords. Just plain white hat SEO (heck, we don't even have H1 or whatever on our website yet we are doing extremely well on the search engines). Word of mouth, longevity of the site, quality of the site that makes other people link to you without you asking them are some of the factors that can help a website win via pure basic SEO.
It CAN be done. ... And many Adsense publishers are doing just that." alika