Once you have your site up and a running you'll need to decide whether you want to use Search Engine Friendly (SEF) urls. We are in favor of SEF URLs because they make it easier for search engines to index and classify your pages. One of the main reasons is that they help to remove irrelevant variables from the url which can confuse the search engine when it tries to determine the relevance of your content in relation to other sites. Logic tells us that they will therefore give preference to sites with the most decipherable urls and will crawl more of their pages on each visit.
You'll also need a sitemap. The sitemap tells the search engine which pages are the important ones. Sites can have hundreds or thousands of pages and you need to tell the search engine that your "Products" page, for example, is important whereas your "Forgot Password?" page is not. Many content management systems or site software have add-ons for sitemap generation. You'll want to use one that creates an XML sitemap wihich. These can be used for Google, Yahoo, Bing and other search engines.
So you have your sitemap. Now you can sign-up to submit sitemaps and track your site's traffic at the following locations:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/
https://www.google.com/analytics/ - Provides monitoring functionality that goes way beyond that of Webmaster Tools. We recommend using both.
