Yup - pretty much the basic website optimization to make the ground fertile.
THEN. Since you don't have money - hopefully you have a lot of time....
Go to those free High PR directories that BHWers constantly post, and submit your site daily. Don't over do it. About 20 a day with a mix of keywords so the SEs will think its natural. Then make sure you have a WP or Joomla site allowing you to post articles on a daily basis. Make sure your articles don't exceed 3% keyword density and it passes copyscape. You can copy tons of articles out there - just rewrite them; shouldn't take more than 10 minutes. Google loves content.
Depending on your competition, you should start to rank top 20 for certain less competitive keywords in 2-4 months.
Also, don't neglect the long tail keywords. Very little search volume by themselves but if you can gather thousands - the traffic can be pretty darn significant. I know of sites with no competitive short keywords getting ranked 1st page but thousands of long tailed keywords getting 40,000 visits a month.