Obviously the point is to optimise our sites to get search engines to spider them and get high ranking. Google offers a webmaster toolkit that requires a code to be added to be verified. I have tried adding it in as suggested by google. But not yet got it to see the required code. Has anyone else used this and if yes - where did you drop the verification code provided ?

If you mean the Google Meta Tag starting
<meta name="verify-v1" content="xxxxxx......
then put it in the top of the /templates/user/index.html file after the <meta name "keywords"....> line. (You might be using a different sub directory than user).
 
Google supplies this to prevent automated submissions.
 
Go back to your Google webmaster pages and click on the verify link next to the site and it will read the new metadata tag off your site to verify you have submitted it.
 
HTH

Thanks Ned dropped in the code as you said ... and got this:
 
We were unable to download a file due to a timeout error.
 
When we accessed your site, we found a robots.txt file or verification file. However, we were unable to read that file due to a server timeout. Make sure that your server is responding and try again. Note that it may take up to a day for the new file to be processed.
 
But the site is up and running?