Google, and its various partners, represent almost half the daily search traffic according to recent data (See: Search Engine Watch) so for the majority of webmasters, its important to conduct google optimization throughout the life of the website. Aside from link building, its the best possible way of ensuring your site eventually achieves high ranking and full indexing on Google.

While Google's constantly shifting goalposts keeps SEO experts on there toe's, no doubt providing both frustration and a guaranteed living for the foreseeable future, the fundamentals don't change all that radically.

A commonsense and ethical approach to keyword selection, link building and site promotion will eventually ensure your site does well in the SERPs, with a gradual increase in PageRank over time.

While its true that large corporations and big business can push there results further and faster due to the massive marketing dollars behind these companies, there's no reason why you can't barge your way to the top of the pile with consistent, high quality, well thought out optimization.

The basics of optimization for Google, are the same for all search engines. Appropriate use of keywords in title, keyword and description tags is a good start. Make sure the title and description accurately reflect the theme of each page. After that you move on to the content and making sure that your chosen keywords appear several times within the text.

Adherence to W3C standards on CSS and XHTML will also provide your site with a good foundation to excel in Google. While designing and coding your website it's important that your code be as lean as possible, so excessive use of technologies such JavaScript, Flash, and other scripting languages will have an impact on your overall success.

After reading all these articles and scouring the web for as much information as possible you will have grasped the fundamentals, but its important to stay informed on the latest trends, both from Google itself, and the massive industry that has spawned around it.