I was recently asked why the wealth of SEO information and How-Tos on the web don't just level the marketplace and make it common knowledge how to get top positions for your keyword searches on google, and therefore impossible to compete as a professional Search Engine Optimizer. The following is my arguement for why that is not true. Keep in mind it was written in a mailing list scenario--so just extrapolate the key points, which truly are helpful and straight to the point for newbies to SEO.

Most people are really lazy. Everyone has the web, but they don't all figure out how to program html from tutorials or get top positions in google for the keyword searches they want. What I'm saying is that you can learn anything with the Web. For instance, SEOBook.com is a great "hub" and links to tons of top SEO tools, and provides tons of top seo tools, but you still gotta learn them all, and make it all make sense for yourself. The same is true for SEOMoz.org and SEOChat.com.

If it's precise tool recommendations you want, here's my Go-Tos:
keyworddiscovery.com
semrush.com
majesticseo.com/
http://advertising.microsoft.com/search-advertising/adcenter_addin
http://www.keywordspy.com/
http://www.seoelite.com/
http://adlab.msn.com/searchfunnel/
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/  (note: this is one of the best--that's why many other services pull from its API)
http://www.spyfu.com/
seomoz.org tools

SEOBOOK tools that you can get as a member:
http://tools.seobook.com/backlink-analyzer
http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html
http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/
http://tools.seobook.com/hub-finder/


Actually, Here's a spreadsheet that outlines very nicely when and what tools to use:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=p6NybEdRtH0PEnZ7VDeSJHw
(note: it's shared and everyone has editing privileges if anyone wants to add new SEO/SEM Tools to it!)

The first column rates the necessity of each tool. And the 2nd column rates at which point in the SEO process you should use the tool. Both values are somewhat related. I made it when I first started out--straight out of SEOBook. I therefore rated the tools I wouldn't need first with lower numerical ratings, so I could sort through all the tools I wanted to focus on.

So basically, if you really want to master SEO and SEM, go to SEOBook, and if you stay hot on the trail, it will link you to everywhere you need to go to become an expert search engine marketer. You'll need to utilize the tools and information you get your hands on, and learn from it, and relatively quick (within a month) you'll know what you're doing. But what you're missing is that there are many "outside the box" techniques you can think of (no not black hat stuff) that you can do to boost your position for searched keywords. It will become not about learning how SEO works anymore, and about cool ways to get tons of links, or write link-bait articles to get tons of links, etc. Getting inbound links is what it's all about, but every hour of the day I could think of a new and creative--and more efficient!--way to get inbound links if I wanted to, and a lot of this might be from researching tons of data extrapolated from SEO research tools.

If someone really wants to make it happen with SEO. Just go to KeywordDiscovery.com or Wordtracker.com (yes, pay for it). Find the keywords in your niche that get the most searches. Export a spreadsheet of it. Go to SEOMoz.org, pay for the subscription and use their keyword difficulty tool. It will give you a value for each of the keywords (which, if you don't know, means: "keyword phrases") that says it's difficulty to rank for (i.e. come up on the first page of google, etc). Take your 3 columns and a 4th column:

Keyword Phrase | # of Searches | Keyword Difficulty | Value Ratio of # of Searches to Difficulty |

Then go find sites to link to pages on your site with those highest value keywords as anchor text. The anchor text is the text in a link (i.e. I can link to http://www.faceyspacey.com with a link that appears to the user as "web 2.0 specialist").

That's the easiest bit, but it's a great start. I won't go into how you can utilize research to target where you're going to get your inbound links from, but the overall THEME IS: QUALITY! You could spend forever optimizing each keyword. That's why I made the value ratio above--so you can produce a database of the highest quality keywords to target, and go after those. You'll do the same with inbound links. You're going to want to sift through data to find 2 main things:

1) sites with the most link-juice that will boost your ranking the most by linking to you (e.g. other sites with lots of links going to it, .edu domains, high trafficked sites, etc)
2) sites that are most likely to link to you.

 If you can kinda guage both into another ratio, go get links from the sites here with the highest value here . That's where the real creativity will get involved, but my suggestion--rather than gaming the system--is to have a product, application, tool, or most commonly content that they want to link to.

Otherwise, there's a million ins and outs of executing this most efficiently (which is the most important thing since u need to spend your time most efficiently). For instance, if you write an article with a top 10 list, linking to top 10 best web developer's in Yorkville Manhattan, and you do it so they will link back to you, you're going to want them to have more link-juice than you, and at a certain point of optimizing your site, it won't even matter that they linked to you. This is called recipirocal linking. Basically, the link juice they gave you, you gave back to them, and cancelled each other out. It's not always a bad thing, especially if they have more link-juice than you. It's just extremely useful to know all these ins and outs, as this stuff takes a ton of time, and you want to be spending it on nothing but QUALITY. One note: it's not just about coming up in search engines--that recipirocal link will also get you direct traffic from the other site. It's about building an organic and natural word of mouth marketing campaign. The idea is that to get the links you either gotta game the system or do something remarkeable enough to get another site to link to you. All those videos that go "viral" on youtube are because the content is appealing. Create content that perfectly taps into fulfills the cravings you've researched your niche to want, and they'll link to it.

Anyway, if anyone wants anymore info, I have a powerpoint I made that breaks SEO down extremely succingtly that I'm very proud of. If anyone wants it, I'll happily send it over.

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