Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Definitely, interested in helping out.   Email me at greg @ LeanWagon

That is correct, you just submit as you would normally.  There are two ways to submit the file:

1. Via the webmaster tools interface.  Have you created your webmaster tools account yet?  Optimization -> Sitemaps -> Add Sitemap

2. By referencing it in your robots.txt.  Just add the following on a new line: Sitemap: http://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Measuring SEO effectiveness can be done a number of ways, but it largely depends on the scale of the change that is being targeted.  If you are looking for a 5% increase in traffic, it's often hard to attribute such change to a particular SEO effort.  However, if you are looking for a 10X increase, it is usually pretty clear whether your efforts hit the mark, or missed it in a big way.

Great question!  You can manually remove all pages from the sitemap, by opening it up in a text editor of your choice, removing offending entries, and saving the file.  Make sure you use a simple text editor like notepad on windows or textwrangler on mac.

It is best to do this before your submission, rather then add pages which you know you don't want indexed and then have to ask google to remove them.

Great question!  You can manually remove all pages from the sitemap, by opening it up in a text editor of your choice, removing offending entries, and saving the file.  Make sure you use a simple text editor like notepad on windows or textwrangler on mac.

It is best to do this before your submission, rather then add pages which you know you don't want indexed and then have to ask google to remove them.