Search engine optimization is a vast topic. Everyone wants their pages
to be ranked number one on google. I thaught about writing this article
when I thaught about putting google ads in my personal website. I thaught 
I should do some research on SEO so my website also would rank high on 
google.

I found the Google Webmaster Tools to be quiet useful. Here's the link  
http://www.google.com/webmasters/ Click on the link. You
will have to signup to use the tools. 

First thing you do is to add your website. Verify it. What I did was to 
create a file with the name given by them then upload the file using ftp
and then verify it. 

It gives a loat of information like. Wether the crawler had accessed by
site, Errors for URLs in Sitemaps, HTTP errors, Not found, URLs not 
followed, URLs restricted by robots.txt, URLs timed out, Unreachable URLs 

Diganostic tools like Web crawl Sees errors and problems encountered by 
Google's crawler while it accessed pages on the site. Content analysis See 
potential problems with site metadata 

Webmaster tools also gives staticstics about your website like 
Top search queries, How google sees your site, Crawl stats, Index stats, 
Subscriber stats 

I would recomend any one building a website to checkout Google Webmaster tools