selene35

Check out smartgardening.com
and go to the section on Building a Healthy Soil -
-- inside that you should see "Soil Characteristics and Testing".

Nice graphs and pictorials, with layman text. They cover 9 factors that contribute to understanding soil health/issues:

Color
Compaction
Moisture content
Organic content
pH
Profile
Structure
Temperature, and
Texture

This site also has a great section on Soil pH