SEO Rookie

Hey Forum,
I have tons of front-end experience, and I'm confident that all of my development habits are pretty SEO-friendly. & I 'get' meta descriptions, titles, keywords, etc. All of the social media theories make sense and seem easy enough.. though time consuming.

I was hoping some of you SEO veterans could help me become more active/aggressive. Are there free must-have tools I should be using? I don't think I want to mess with goals just yet..

Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

Google's webmaster tools is the first, which you might already know about...

and I use multiple plugins for Chrome, which you can download for free from google's webstore...

You can use this tool to help you track everything you are doing.

SEO quake is a good Firefox plugin, also I find Yahoo site explorer and web positions Gold are good SEO Resources

you didnt say how much do you know about seo all these tools arent helping if you dont know how to use them.

So the basics should be onsite optimization and keyword research. Find out how to find a niche keyword and how to optimze your site for this key. Onsite optimization is much more than just title, description and meta-tags.

After that you should dive in in Offpage SEO. This is much more complicated and everyone has his own tactics. But you should begin with the basic understandment of Google and the rating of links

Blogs are a nice resource. If you want to you can buy a book too. im just not familare with english seo books, but it could be a good idea