What tools and resources are available to help bloggers start optimizing their blogs?
I love SEOmoz and can vouch firsthand for the quality of their Pro content. Having their experts answer your questions is worth the price of admission alone in my opinion. And yet they give you in-depth, advanced, well-researched articles as well. And if you're still not satisfied, there's regular SEO tips and industry-leading SEO tools in there.
If you want to see some practical applications of what it can mean, check out my SEOmoz Pro Review. I'll also eventually be complementing that review with plugins and SEO tools of my own that people who buy through my links to SEOmoz Pro will get access to (but don't wait; either buy straight through their link or check out my site first). Disclaimer: I get paid when people buy premium memberships through my review site. (I don't get paid when they go direct to SEOmoz from the first link, and if you don't care to read what I have to say, then just go buy directly from them. I'd still advocate people getting the Pro membership even if I'm not getting a commission. Besides - at $50/month, it's dirt cheap. Their services cost $10,000/mo and up!).
Something else which I'm a huge fan of is Aaron Wall's SEO for Firefox. It makes competitive research a heck of a lot easier!
I'm considering Aaron's paid training program. I bought his SEO Book when it was available (it's now bundled with his training) and learned a lot from it. My inkling is that the training is probably worth it. However, it costs double what SEOmoz does, at $100/month, and the services are pretty comparable, so my preference is for SEOmoz (again, notice friendship partly at work - SEOmoz's crew have always treated me really well, while Aaron's been an unnecessarily tough cookie at times. That said, I'd prefer SEOmoz independently of our relationship, too).
Besides that, have a look around for plugins that add navigation to your blog and help you create a sitemap as well as the plugins I mentioned above.
What should bloggers track to evaluate their SEO progress (i.e., what statistics should they be looking at, how should they track results, etc.)?
It all depends on your goals. If you're blogging and you're part of an ecommerce business, then track sales/revenue/order size/other financial metrics where the visitor originated from a search engine. If your business model is ads, track ad sale revenue. If you just want influence, look at the growth of your repeat visitors in particular and at the number of times they return.
My favorite tool is Sitemeter Pro, though Sitemeter free is pretty good too if you have the patience to dig through your logs. The advantage with Pro is that you can export your data, access more of it (last 4000 visits vs. last 100 for the free version) and get your search engine keywords that are referring visitors neatly displayed to you. If your budget is tight, start with the free version as it'll get you used to looking at data and probably make you enjoy it, too.
Another statistic that is important for getting your ideas passed on (and thus eventually garnering links) is the number of subscribers you have. I personally use ClickAudit click tracking to tell how many people have clicked a "subscribe to my RSS feed" link. I've already got 350+ subscribers based on that and am aiming for 600 by the end of May.
Finally, while I'm regularly advocating for people to minimize the amount of data that they share with Google (because it can be used against you), I have to commend the idea Joost Devalk had about Google Analytics. It achieves similar functionality to what ClickAudit does for me, but for outgoing links only. The real reason I commend it is because it helps you figure out who is benefitting from your links and thus what relationships you have contributed to developing recently. All of which gets back to my social media analytics proposal.
