Nick Wilson, over at performancing.com has a nice interview with “senior Google engineer and webmaster relations chappy Matt Cutts” that sheds some light on SEO as it relates to blogging.
I think everyone should sit down with Google's webmaster guidelines and just read it all. It will only take a couple hours, but the time is well worth it. Make sure you subscribe to the official search engine blogs. I have a lot of respect for Danny Sullivan, and there are some real experts at WMW and TW. If you've got any kind of coding experience, try to build a search engine yourself. You'd be amazed what you learn. Take random info out on the net with a grain of salt unless you know something about the poster's credibility.
Exclusive: Google Teaches Bloggers How To Rank [Performancing.com] [Lifehacker]