Fortunately it's pretty straightforward to accomplish. The basic idea is to apply straight-forward web markup in specific, defined, ways.
I'm collecting data and stuff here:- http://webmaster-tips.davidherron.com/seo/index.html
In particular, this page http://webmaster-tips.davidherron.com/seo/implement-metatags.html shows how straight-forward it is.
One of the key things is implementing Google Authorship, because Google is looking to add a notion of high quality authors to the ranking of search results. But in practice many of us write for many websites, and our content is scattered all around the web. But with Google Authorship, one links their content, wherever it's published, over to your Google+ profile, and then Google is able to associate things so that a search engine result listing can look like this:
This isn't the search engine results from years ago. This has my picture, and some data about my Google+ connections. Cool.
Okay, a not-so-cool thing about this is the subtle way it encourages us to use Google+ rather than Facebook or Twitter. The implementation is so generic that I wish Google had actually made it generic, rather than tying the profile to a Google+ profile.
The implementation is straight-forward - just set up a few <link> tags in your pages, and then on Google+ link back to every site you contribute to.