Best free SEO tools and lessons?

[ghanes14]

I am putting together my own site, I am almost done with it (just need a name). So I figure the next step to take is SEO, however I do not have the money to pay a company to do my dirty work. I do not know much about SEO.

I am needing to know good places to learn about SEO and some of the best free tools to use.

[Josh]

There are a ton of online resources with their own opinions on the best SEO practices. Smashing Magazine likely has several articles covering Internet marketing.

Just browse some blogs and you should find what you're looking for. If not, ask a specific question and I'll do my best to answer.

[Mayan master]

The big things to remember about SEO is your website has to be easy to read by a crawler, which is essentially a robot.

You want to make it as easy for the crawler as possible to find what your website is about.
For example, you should always include a link to your sitemap on the homepage. A sitemap is a collection of links to all the pages on your website. Don't make your sitemap flash or silverlight, just ext, since crawlers can't read flash or silverlight.
Having flash or silverlight is still okay, as long as you also have text links.

To help google image search find you, all your images should have alternate text (the text that shows when you move your cursor on it, or if the image doesn't load)

Another thing: All links to other websites should be relevant. If you link to a website that's completely different than your own, add the nofollow tag before doing so.

Google loves fresh content. Having a blog that you regularly update, and updating your general website content frequently helps you attain a high google ranking.

And lastly, make your pages easy to load. Speed is now taken into account by the crawler, and if your webpage takes an excessively long time to load, that can hurt your ranking.

When I first became interested in learning about SEO, I found an awesome 9 page guide for beginners SEO at http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-...timization