The ramblings of a developer
I get a lot of questions about getting started with SEO. Here are the links we recommend for the beginners looking to learn a little more about the topic.
The first is Google's webmaster tools. These tools give you feedback on your site and tell you how your site is performing. You can use the webmaster tools to get an idea of the errors that Google finds while crawling your site. This includes missing meta tags and page titles. The second link is a PDF guide published by Google. I have linked to this guide before but it is worth linking to again. Use this guide as a reference for good SEO practices.
Remember, SEO is not an overnight fix. You can not publish your site today and have it magically be #1 on Google the next day.Do not try to 'game' SEO.Good SEO takes time.
What is the most important thing that I can recommend for good SEO? Write unique content and continue writing unique content. Writing content and following good SEO practices as outlined in the PDF linked above will give you a great start to ranking in Google's search index.