Getting indexed on Google and keeping up with the results is a bit time consuming.   The added a tool called "sitemaps" a while ago that makes it easier to point Google to your pages and now (or should be soon), MSN and Yahoo will be supporting the sitemaps.

This post is not so much on the sitemaps as it is on their new tools.  Simple add your sites to the following area:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/

Once you sites are added and indexed, there is a host of information available to you.  When you click on your site in the grid, you get information of the last time Google crawled you site along with link to show you what pages are indexed on your site.  Also, there is a list of errors the Google search bot found while scanning your site.  This can be greatly helpful to figure out dead links you have on your site or those that are not being served to Google as they should.

There are tools such as:

Robot.txt Analysis:  shows how Google is viewing that file.  On one of my sites it was hindering the Googlebot due to a rule that Google ignores. 

Crawl Rate:  gives you information on how often and at what rate Google crawls your site.  It also has an option to slow down the bot if it is crawling your site too much.

Enhanced Image Search:  Here you can opt in to have images on your site included in the Google Image search section.

Then there is the "statistics" tab the "Page Analysis" can be pretty handy but the one I love the most is the "Query Stats" section. This gives you details about you positioning based on search keywords.  You might want to keep track of this!

Be sure to also check out their Analytics tool, easy to get going and no performance hit on your server:

http://www.google.com/analytics