Google, via it's evangelist Adam Lasnik is starting to provide SEO classes. As you can see here the seminars are cheap and open to all.
It begs the question about Google asking people to create web sites for people and not for their robots. However, it is true that the best idea is to build your web sites for your target population while respecting W3C standards, and then optimise your code for search engines.
Once you have read a fair amount about Search Engine Optimization, you realise that most people are just guessing what is working and then try to make you think they have the real deal when it's likely that they only have half the story. Optimising pages is partly logical on the basics and then guess work on what may be used by Google to define the order of their results. I personally think they should spend more time dealing with the weeds like domain name parking with pages full of adverts/links...