Once there is some content on your site and the menu structure is in place, you will see that your sitemap contains a decent number of links for Google to crawl. So, now it's time to give the search engines some food to eat by submitting the sitemap to Google Webmaster Central and placing a special spot in the robots.txt file.
Once you have submitted your site, log in to Google Webmaster Central and see if everything works without problems.
You can also get a nice overview on some of the terms you are ranking for at that moment. The ranking should grow in time as there will be more content to index, thus giving you more possibilities to rank.
Using Google webmaster tools you can set the preferred URL that Google should use for indexing your web site.
This should reflect your own preference and your guess to what your visitors would use. In my case I opted for the www. version, as I think that the expected visitors to the site will use that option as well.
If you want to go full out in SEO terms, go for the non-www. version. It gives you four (4!) extra characters in your URL, as shown in the search engine results.
One other page for analysis of your site that you really need to check, but is mostly forgotten by a lot of webmasters, is the one under the Diagnostics section called HTML Suggestions.
If you click on those results, you will get a link to each page that has a problem so that you can easily fix the problems mentioned. Getting this page to show no problems at all will help you do better in your SEO efforts. The part of the webmaster tools that you will probably visit the most is Your site on the web.
This section shows you the ranking results you have achieved. There is also a page called Keywords that you need to check out. If the main keywords you want to target are not on that page, you need to improve your content so that they show up.
The results shown are from Google's Webmaster tool, but we also use Google Analytics and StatCounter to learn more about other keyword rankings you achieved. I found that these result pages give only an indication, but a check on the links and keywords that come in from the other stat programs will reveal a lot more.
With the first results from Google and StatCounter, it's now time to analyze the results so far. In StatCounter you can look at the keyword analysis to see if the most important keywords are indeed bringing you the traffic. If not, then again look at the content and the structure of the site.
Also in Analytics, you can see the keywords used by your visitors to come to your site:
For me this list means that I need to check the site for spelling mistakes, especially the first and the eighth term. On the other hand, it was really nice to see the result shown in the following screenshot, the ninth position out of 4.85 million hits!
It's a promising start, but there is still a lot of work to do on the site.
As you know, localization of the site title also helps. For example, if an individual staying in Los Banos searches for terms such as "landscapers Los Banos", then the site may appear in the top 10. If this were a real business site, it would definitely be very helpful to get it into Google maps.