The best way to know the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) is to learn from the experts. These experts, of course, have their own blogs in which they publish their ways to achieving those good Google results. Naturally, they won't tell you their secrets. You'll just have to find them or formulate a SEO technique of your own.
For guidance, here's SEO Blog Roll to deliver us the latest news straight from the SEO experts' blogs.