These days you can still hire cum laude English graduates who will be really excited about earning an SEO salary after they acquire a little experience.

They are superb writers, they will excel at KW research, they are great communicators and they can quickly and easily learn the rules of the code THE WAY YOU WANT IT DONE (not how some hack has taught them).

With a little training you can give them just about any job in the house and they will be great at writing content.

Keep in mind that great content can defeat SEO over time and crappy KW research is a waste of good SEO..

Toss an ad up to Craigslist saying that you need a great WordSmith to become an expert on writing and tending websites and watch what comes in.

This is what we do.  Keep the content on your own site... but share where only a signpost pointing to your site will be present.  This earns links, brings traffic, and reduces duplicate content risk.

What are these "direct" visitors doing on your site?

Hitting a specific page?  Loading an image?  Robots crawling?  Robots checking pages for change?

I am suspicious that these are not genuine human visits.

Probably a Panda problem.

The site has thin content:  Lots of the pages have close to zero content.

The site has duplicate content:  Content was stolen by your client or others stole it from him.  Look here.

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The title tags need work:

<title>woody-coloring-pages-002 - Coloring Pages ABC Kids Fun Pagetitle>

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The site has a huge intellectual property problem.  There may be DMCA's against the site.  Rankings could be reduced by the Emanuel Update.

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Potential Penguin problems:  The site solicits "link exchange" and "link partners".

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My advice to client would be to abandon this site unless he has rights to the images.

<title>woody-coloring-pages-002 - Coloring Pages ABC Kids Fun Pagetitle>

I have a little different point of view.

If you are a very smart and very motivated person I would join SEOmoz for a few months and  get all of the learning possible here.  EVERYTHING.  At the same time I would start a website and start experimenting with what I have learned.   (Do not do  this on a site that a business or employees depend upon!)

Ask lots of questions here in Q&A.  Not general questions.  Ask very specific questions about what you don't understand.

Then, after you have learned a lot and have a site working to the best of your ability, hire an SEO for consultations on your site.  Have him/her look at what you have done and recommend on how it can be better.  Keep working on that site.

I believe that this study, work, and consultation will yield really good results and give feedback on a practical project.  And since you have skin in the game you will work harder and see practical benefit than simply working through a course that might not be directly relecant.