If you have done nothing to improve the search engine rankings of your web pages, here’s some advice that gives results.

The web is full of sound (and unsound) advice on how you can improve your search engine rankings and increase your online visibility. There is a whole industry out there catering to companies that try to get more customers and more sales online.

But what if you can’t afford that? You don’t have the money and you don’t have the time to read books on search engine optimization, attend search engine marketing conferences of hire search marketers.

Actually, unless your site or blog is targeting a very competitive area, you can achieve a lot search engine wise by applying the following basic tactics.

1. Identify the right keyword phrases and put them in your headlines

Find out what search terms your target audience will use when looking for the kind of information, goods or services your site provides.

These phrases are never self evident. Do not take for granted that others will use the phrases you use yourself when searching for the same topic.

Google has a free service for identifying relevant search queries. You can also test the excellent Wordtracker service for free.

Include keywords in a headline that tells the search engines what the page is about: When you write articles or blog posts, try to include relevant keyword phrases in the headline of the post. The headline is by far the most important source of information for the search engines when they try to find out what the page is about.

Most blogging software will make sure that this headline also appears in the TITLE field of the page (the text that appears on top of the browser window), which is good.

Then make sure that the keyword phrase is included in the text itself, at least once near the top.

The web is not the place for poetic and creative headlines. Puns and jokes, entertaining as they are, do not help the search engines and they do not help the reader understand what the page is about. Web readers are very impatient and will leave your site if they don’t immediately “get it”.

Our search engine tutorial has more on selecting keywords.

2. Cover relevant sister sites to get inbound links

Identify the most important high quality sites covering your topic, and include them in a resource section on your site.

Do not put up a large link collection! Make it a valuable catalog over useful online sources of information, adding one or two informative sentences to each link.

Your readers will love you for this section. You have done some really hard research for them, and they may bookmark this page and come back.

The sites you link to may discover your page via their web analytics software, and if they like it they may link back.

You need links like that, as incoming links from high quality authoritative sites will give you a big boost in your search engine rankings over time.

3. Write reviews of relevant sites

Which is why you should write reviews about the sites you like the most. Good, honest, useful reviews that help your readers and impress the owners of the sites you are reviewing. Their willingness to link back to you increases tenfold if you give them good coverage.

Send them a mail as soon as your review is up. Do not beg them for a link back. Popular web sites get a large number of link requests every week, and will normally ignore that kind of requests. Just add one or two paragraphs in your mail giving a summary about what your site is about. They will often link to it if they like it.

4. Keep track of your traffic

You definitely need some kind of software that informs you about your traffic, and especially where your traffic is coming from. You need to know what pages succeed, and which pages don’t, and you need to know what kind of search phrases people use when they find you using Google, Yahoo!, Live or Ask.

Your web hotel will normally provide such services for free, installing the relevant software for you.

You may also make use of online services like Google Analytics. It is free.

Many low scale bloggers find that Feedburner gives them all the data they need. If you select the Pro version, which is free, Feedburner will help you publish your web feeds and give you simple statistics on web traffic. If you want to make a living on the web, you need more, though.

5. Provide useful content

None of these tactics help if you do not provide useful high quality content, however.

If you have a news site or a blog, you should publish regularly. For a blog at least once a week. Two to three times a week is good, and once every day is perfect.

It is better to publish fewer high quality posts than many of low quality, though. If you publish too much, readers may find it hard to identify the gems and get frustrated. You don’t want that!

Remember that for each page you add to your site, the chances of people finding your site through the search engines increase. As each page has a different headline or “key keyword phrase” you add new gateways to your site with each page or post.

These gateways may also be used by webmasters looking for relevant info. If they find your page valuable, you may gain a link.

Adding pages and increasing the number of inbound links takes time. It often takes months before you see results, and at least a year before your site becomes a search engine winner.

See Pandia’s Search Engine Marketing 101 for more tips and more detailed advice on how to improve your search engine rankings.