I am planning an informational site on php with mysql. I have read about google sitemap and webmaster tools.
What i did not understand is will google be able to inde
You have to link to the page for Google to notice it. And the more links you have the higher up in Google's result list your page will get. A smart thing to do is to find a page where you can link to all of your pages. This way Google will find them and give them a higher ranking than if you only link to them once.
You could alternatively make the url SEO friendly with mod_rewrite www.domain.com/articles/103
RewriteRule ^articles/(.*)$ articles.php?articleid=$1 [L]
I do suggest you give each individual page relevant meta tags no more then 80 chars and dont place the article content within a table
tag as googles placement algorithm is strict, random non related links will also do harm to the rank.
A URL is a URL, Google doesn't give up when it sees a question mark in one (although excessive parameters may get ignored, but you only have one). All you need is a link to a page.