My site manages to get 1-3 search landings a day despite the bulk of it being less than 6 months old, and with me not knowing anything about SEO until very recently. Difficult, but possible. Sometimes it feels a bit like voodoo though. Most of the things I rank for are things I wasn't even aiming at.

The niche site I started as an experiment a few months back is actually doing better than the older site.