When I import, I do the following (I shoot RAW only with a Nikon):
~Convert the NEF files to DNG files. NEF is Nikon's raw file type. DNG is an open source file type (I think). Scott Kelby talks about it in his LR books, and his reasoning made sense to me, so that's what I do. You might be abe to google for more information on it.
~I import and backup at the same time. One copy goes to my EHD, another copy goes to my laptop hard drive (which I clear out randomly when the mood strikes). Everything gets copied to my 2 other EHD's eventually, and I rarely travel without one, so there's no real need for me to put them on my laptop, other than for peace of mind. I actually just deleted all of 2008 and 2009 off the laptop since they're on 3 EHD's and burned to DVD, lol.
~I have my imports set to all dump into 1 folder. I organize my photo folders by year, and then month and that's it. So everything for January 2011 is dumped into one big LR folder. (I export to a JPG folder within the January 2011 folder when I'm done in LR, and there's a web folder within the JPG folder. All files stay inside their respective month folders.) I like the catalog better having everything in 1 folder, than having 43920 folders for every time I imported that month. That's probably personal preference though.
~I set up a basic copyright (also from Kelby's book) and everything imported has that attached to it.
That's about it, I think. Pretty easy.
One of these days I'll get better about keyword tagging and setting up special collections for my favorite photos, but I'm just not there yet. LR does SO MUCH that I haven't touched. I don't even really play with presets very much. I mostly do basic editing and then move to PS and use my TRA actions.