After you have a website up and running, you will want to get it indexed in Google. This means Google's bots have visited your site and added it to Google's database of websites. In other words, unless you let Google know about your site somehow,

To see if you are indexed, type site:yoursite.com into Google. Did anything come up? If so, congratulations, you are indexed! If not, then you need to let Google know about your site.

The easiest way to do this is to get another site (one that is already indexed) to link to yours, and one of the fastest and easiest ways to do this is to use GoArticles.com. It's free and quick. Simply sign up, write an article about your site, and provide a clickable link within your author bio by using the following HTML code:

<a href="http://www.yoursite.com">Click here to learn more about my site</a>

Or even better, make the clickable text something related to your site. Regardless, after the article appears on the site Google will then follow the links from the already indexed GoArticles and discover your new site, index it, and add it to it's database.

Another way of doing this is to install Google Analytics on your site. This is a free service provided by Google that allows you to track numbers of visitors, where they came from, where they went, what keywords they discovered your site with, etc.

Signing up is fairly straightforward, but you will then be given some code to copy and paste into the HTML code on every page on your site. Depending on how you built your site, this may be labor intensive or not. Using a content management system, you can install the code once on the template PHP page and it will be dynamically generated with every new page on your site. If you have a simple HTML website, you will have to copy and paste the code before the </body> tag on every page on your site.

After you confirm that you have done so with Analytics, it will then take awhile to gather information about your site, but to do so your site will then become indexed.

A third way to get indexed is to simply advertise on Google Adwords. This is a pay-per-click service that displays ads at the top of search results for keywords of your choosing, but running it for your site will also get it indexed.

Now, of course, getting indexed is just the first part of the battle. The second part is getting your site to the tops of the search engines for keyterms. This can be a difficult subject, and there is a lot of mis-information being parroted around. I suggest you begin learning with the beginner's guide at SEOmoz.org.