Learning the SEO Ropes

First off let me say that I love to learn, self taught in many ways on a variety of things, if I see a good resource I will read as much as I can. Learning SEO is important to me for sevral reasons. One major one is I want to increase my revenue on my sites so that I can hire a good resource to assist with SEO at some point. But I want to know good SEO to know if the expert does quality work.

My point of view is that an expert can help lift traffic which will help with even more revenue. I have asked several questions in here and been provided with a lot of good advice, I read most every thread in this subforum through out the day and I try to keep up with things. There is always the question of what should SEO service or an expert cost, etc. and much of the advice is learn SEO first - I agree.

My question to the forum is, beyond this forum where else do you point people so that we can learn quickly. It seems there are so many conflicting points of view or disagreements on different topics. I want to know legit techniques and nothing shady, seems like SEO is an area fraught with "experts" willing to take your money and screw you with the next Google algorithms.

But are there some sites that for the most part are some of the best sources that have a blog or site like Yoast, etc? I dont mind asking questions but sometimes I dont even know what to ask, but a good website etc will help me to learn more so I can ask the questions.

Thanks - sorry for the long winded plea for help!