Internet City Marketing

What are some obvious webmaster guidelines or website guidelines? I have being participating in various internet marketing forums and i see a lot of questions centered around, can i do this? would i be penalized by the search engine if i do this?

Why dont we simply surf over to the biggest search engine in the world, google and read through its stated webmaster guidelines or website guidelines for it to index the website?

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769

I guess it answers a lot of question. Some of the questions that i have too.