I'd love to know some good resources on this topic too. Feels too much like black magic, only passed on when you join the magic circle. Though I'm convinced there must be some good, reliable, trustworthy and relevant resources out there somewhere! It's just hard to discern the good from the bad when you're uninformed. Would love for someone in the know to enlighten us
The best way to avoid the snake oil is to stay away from learning on forums, especially black hat forums. Most often the OP have some 'amazing trick' they discovered that will make lightning come from the sky and shoot your site up to the top of Google, you just to buy a tool that they so happen to make. Most often than not they don't work or only work a lil bit but may come back to bite you on the end.
SEOmoz has a great beginners course, Distilled has Distilled University http://www.distilled.net/u/ and following reputable blogs and sites will help Search Engine Journal http://www.searchenginejournal.com, Search Engine Land http://searchengineland.com ... to name a few. If you do come across some material that you're not sure of check their research which they should provide. If they can only give personal, anecdotal results with no data to back it up you should stay away from it.
Most SEO consultants nowadays preach the same things Google does: basic usability, relevant content, optimizing for particular keywords, making it easy for search engines to index your content, and relevant backlinks. You can dive pretty deep in each of these categories.
I like Danny Sullivan and http://searchengineland.com which is targeted at SEOs and generally holds Google accountable for their actions. SEOMoz is targeted more at beginners and regurgitates Google's line too often for my taste, but they do have a lot of great tutorials and videos.
Good SEO is less black magic, and more best practices just like there are best practices for web usability, best practices for email newsletters, and best practices for writing code.
Huckster salesmen make it seem like black magic when they over promise and under deliver to small businesses.
The SEOmoz Beginner's Guide to SEO is the best place to start, as well as the whole SEOmoz blog. You could spend months just reading all of their posts.
Neil Patel's Advanced Guide to SEO is excellent once you have a few months under your belt.
