Security works best when it layered. Therefore, in order to protect your online accounts, it is best to have a strong-password, and to ensure that you always login from trusted computers and/or via trusted networks ( and preferably using SSL ). However, with most of the online services today, as long as someone has your userid and password, it means that your account can be accessed. In other words, your password is a single-point of failure, and no matter how strong it is, if it gets keylogged or phished, then basically your account is open. One of the ways of preventing this is by using something known as two-factor authentication, which needs additional piece of randomly generated information to complete the login process.
Since February 2011, Google has enabled access to to two-factor authentication for their services to common users. After about 2 weeks of deliberation, I decided to bite the bullet and activate two factor authentication on my account. If you are a heavy user of Google Services, you may consider it worthwhile to enable this feature on your Google account as well. It does add an extra step in the login process as part of increasing your account security, but may be worthwhile if your Google account is important to you.
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