Mesa Verde has tons of overlooks and pull-outs.  If you only have time for a few stops at some overlooks I highly recommend you stop at Sun Point View.  The overlook is only about 50 feet from the parking area and absolutely worth it!

Sun Point View offers an incredible vantage point to many cliff dwellings including Cliff Palace.  This is a great and easy site to visit with a lot of bang for your buck.

Seeing the cliff dwellings scattered across the canyon give you a real good sense for the scale of Mesa Verde National Park.  You can see so many ruins that it seems that the Ancestral Pueblo, the ancient people who built the cliff dwellings, built them all over the place!  Scan across the valley and you will see dwellings in just about every alcove.  Use the monocular at the cliff edge to view the dwellings up close.

These dwellings would have been occupied around the year 1225 until the end of the 13th century.