Is a website with decent seo good enough to get your first few thousand visitors?

I have a site that has resources and tools. It has decent SEO data with titles, keywords, and good niche specific text in the page content. We've registered with search engines. Does the web work in such a way to start driving a few thousand visitors to the site? Or do you need to stimulate demand with ads?

Don't forget that an important part of the SEO is the off page SEO --> links from other websites that point to the yours. If you have any, the position of your website in the search result will be impacted (negatively). So you should spend some time by creating this environment (try blogs of people active in your domain, articles in webzines,...).

If depends a lot of the domain you are active in...

Another advice to make you an opinion: take a website of similar product/service as the yours (and of a company of +/- the same size as the yours = don't compare your "one man company" to IBM website), so ideally websites of some of your direct competitors and try to make some searches on Google/Bing/...

• are their websites well placed for the keyword you search for? Maybe they are not shown at all! (or perhaps at the 1000th page of results)
• if there are several competitors, c*ompare their position in the search result and their respective websites * - can you find the reason of the difference in the search result (better texts, faster website, more or less relevan to the keyword,...)?

--> then you can already analyse that experience and take some coclusions

Other advices (maybe you did it already):

• ask Google, Bing,... to index your site
• register yourself to the Google Analytics tool and Google Webmaster Tools = A MUST (+ its equivalents for Bing and other search engines)
• if your website has an important number of pages, create a sitemap in XML and submit it to the search engines
• don't forget the "offline world" - speak about your site, advertise in the real world (heavily depending on the product/service you provide)

PS2: it heavily depends on the competition but in general, prepare yourself that it will be hard (just to avoid you a deception). One last advice: GO FOR NICHE and GO TO THE DEEP... There are too many "superficial" and "main information" websites. And they have any chance to generate "thousand visitors/day" traffic without heavy marketing and huge AdWords campaigns.

There are lots of factors affects to your website when you are applying SEO. It is totally depend on your website domain and keyword competitions.

This depends very much on your competition and number of search related to your website. You will need to do a bit of SEO work in order to find out about this.

There is a tool in Google Adwords that can give you an idea about competition and number of searches for the search terms you're interested in.

SEO is also about content, so you could start a blog too and start writing about your resources and tools.