Google Webmaster Tools Center and the Google Webmaster Blog are two best resources for managing the SEO for your website. For starters, Google published a SEO Starters Guide on its blog which is very good guide for setting the basic concepts right for your website. The pdf guide provides overview and best practices under the following headings:
Create unique, accurate page titles
Make use of the “description” meta tag
Improve the structure of your URLs
Make your site easier to navigate
Offer quality content and services
Write better anchor text
Use heading tags appropriately
Optimize your use of images
Make effective use of robots.txt
Promote your website in the right ways
Though its a very basic document but with good enough tips and best practices for starters. I would recommend to subscribe to the Google Webmasters Tools blog RSS feeds. There is nothing like learning from Google itself for SEO.
