Apart from online forums and Google's robust offering, there are a range of specialized learning and diagnostic tools. What follows are a few tools that are especially helpful.
Copyscape is a free and paid online service that allows you to check an article to make sure it doesn't contain content that has already been published somewhere on the Web. This is especially helpful if you are outsourcing the content writing for your website. Some writers may try to copy articles they find online and pass them off as their own. You can use Copyscape to make sure that the content you're buying is truly original. The free service is limited, but available and helpful for occasional use. The cost of the paid service is $0.05 per credit, and it consumes one credit for each article you check. You need to buy a minimum of 100 or 200 credits at a time, depending on your payment method. You can find the tool at http://www.copyscape.com.
Pingdom offers a free tool that allows you to test the load time of any page on your website. The Pingdom Site Speed Checker is located at http://tools.pingdom.com/. Just type the URL of any web page in the box and click on Test Now. The test results will tell you how long the page takes to load completely, how many objects are on the page, how many scripts and images are loaded, and more. With this tool, you can diagnose slow-loading pages. If your pages take more than eight to ten seconds to load, you might consider reducing the file sizes of large image files. Pingdom will give you the load time per element, so you'll know which files are consuming the bulk of your load times.
HubSpot is a purveyor of a reasonably effective do-it-yourself SEO solution. For a monthly fee, you get a host of online tools and access to consultants and webinars. The service is a decent value for those willing to do the bulk of the work themselves. Among their free offerings (intended to introduce you to the HubSpot family of services) is HubSpot's Website Grader, located at http://websitegrader.com.
Just enter your website's URL and e-mail address, and the HubSpot Grader will deliver a report which will be sent to you that analyzes your website for a group of optimization factors and determines a score from 1 to 100; if there is a blog on your site, it will receive a separate grade.
The report also determines how many pages are indexed in Google and tells you the readability level of your site. Other information provided in the report includes the number of images on the page, the domain age, and the number of inbound links your site has. The report gives suggestions on how to improve your website's grade. The tool is a helpful one-stop glance at how effectively your optimization is progressing.
Flippa is a marketplace where domains and existing website are bought and sold. Flippa is a spin-off of the popular Sitepoint marketplace. Flippa is located at: https://flippa.com/.
Flippa offers an auction format with a buy it now option. At any given time, Flippa will have about 1,000 listings. Websites from all niches are offered. Prices range from fifty dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars for established sites with revenue. You can browse listings for free, but registration is required to send messages or bid on websites for sale.
SEOmoz offers SEO software tools for SEO professionals. Their plans start at $99 per month for the Pro package, which includes up to five campaigns, 250 keywords, 10,000 pages, two custom Q&As, access to the free API, and all of the Pro tools and guides. This software is not for the hobby blogger who is only making a few dollars per month. It is a full-featured software that is highly respected within the industry.
The SEO Toolbar from SEOmoz, on the other hand, is free, although somewhat restricted in features. This toolbar allows you to view information about the sites you visit as you surf the Web. Metrics are given for Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. The toolbar also allows you to highlight nofollow links so you can easily see whether the links on any given page pass link juice.
SEOmoz offers several other useful SEO tools. However, some of them require a Pro membership to really be useful. For example, the Open Site Explorer is a backlink checker that shows results for up to 1000 pages with a Pro membership, but free members can only see a few. The competitive link research tool helps you find sites your competitors are getting links from, and the juicy link finder tells you where other sites are getting links for your target keywords, but both of these tools are again available to Pro members only.
Other tools available through SEOmoz include a historical PageRank checker, which can give you a history of a website's PageRank, and the Linkscape Visualization and Comparison tool, which helps you compare the backlink profile of your website with that of a competitor. The Link Acquisition Assistant helps you find places where you might be able to get a high PR link for your website.
You can find the site at http://www.seomoz.org.
Search Engine Journal is a highly read and widely respected search engine optimization blog and online magazine that features articles by nine different writers (and guest authors) on a variety of topics related to search engines, especially Google. Topics covered recently include information that Google collects about its users, Google Places, and local search traffic. This website publishes new articles by SEO professionals on a regular basis.
You can find the Search Engine Journal at http://www.searchenginejournal.com.
Another widely respected search engine optimization blog is an online magazine named Search Engine Roundtable. The Search Engine Roundtable calls their site "the pulse of the search engine community". The editors post regular articles about search engine news on a variety of topics. The Search Engine Roundtable has five editors and two writers who contribute content to the site. Find them at http://www.seroundtable.com.
The Blogging Labs website is run by Robb Sutton, owner of Bike198.com. He is an avid bicyclist who has achieved a high level of success making money with his blogs, and Blogging Labs is the site where he shares his knowledge about making money online. The articles on Blogging Labs cover everything from affiliate marketing to selling physical products to using social media to promote your blog. He shares information on how to monetize your websites, how to attract readers, and much more. You can find the site at http://www.blogginglabs.com.
At ProBlogger (http://www.problogger.com), you'll find a variety of articles about making money with your website. Examples of recent topics include how to run a contest on your blog, using a magazine to make your blog better, and finding ideas and inspiration. Darren Rowse makes a living from his blogs, which include TwiTip - Twitter Tips and Digital Photography School. His ProBlogger blog provides useful information about making affiliate sales, attracting subscribers, and monetization.
WebProNews publishes articles and educational information about search engines and e-commerce. Topics covered by this website include crafting good landing pages, remarketing to customers who leave your site without buying anything, mobile web usage, marketing on social media sites, sales tax compliance, and more. You can find the site at http://www.webpronews.com.
David Mihm is an SEO professional with a focus on local search marketing. Each year, he publishes a definitive study on local search ranking factors. You can find it here at http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml. His study is more than a blog post; he interviews dozens of local search professionals and invites them to contribute their assessment of specific ranking elements in local search. David Mihm compiles the results of the study and the result is a tremendously valuable guide to local search ranking factors.
This single document is a must-read for any business person who operates in a local market.
My Blog Guest (http://myblogguest.com) is a community of bloggers where you can find guest posts to publish on your website and submit posts for other members to post on their sites. When you first sign up, you'll need to add your websites with a category for each website and some tags. Then you can browse the Articles Gallery to see if there are any articles that are appropriate for your site. Once you find an article you like, you can submit an offer to the author to publish the article. The author then gets a message letting him know about the offer. The author can then accept or decline.
If you want to write guest posts for other people's blogs, take a look at the section of the forum labeled "Looking for a guest for my blog". You'll find plenty of opportunities there, but it does take some time to sort through them. If you would prefer to write your articles and post them in the Articles Gallery for other members to browse through, you'll have to upgrade your membership to Pro, which costs $20 per month. The basic membership is free.
Keyword Strategy (http://www.keywordstrategy.org) is not a free tool, but it is very powerful. This tool helps you find keywords to target for each of your websites. You can set up as many different website projects as you need and use the tool to find the best keywords for each one. After you add a website, you can use the "Get Keywords" function to search for new keywords. Start by entering a fairly broad term related to your project. The tool will return a list of keyword suggestions. You can blacklist the ones that are not relevant to your site, and then import the rest. Repeat this process using different seed keywords until you have several thousand possible keywords.
Now you'll want to narrow down the choices, but first you have to wait for your keywords to update. In order to keep you from getting locked out of Google, the Keyword Strategy tool processes the keywords somewhat slowly. It does about 3000 per day, so if you have more than that, you'll need to leave your browser open with the tool running for a couple of days or longer until they are all updated. Once that is done, you can sort and filter your keyword results by the number of monthly searches, the number of exact-match searches in Google (competition), or the KEI (keyword effectiveness index). If you get enough keywords into the system, you'll find plenty of phrases that have a decent number of searches with very little competition. These are the keywords that will typically be easiest to rank for.