I'm not sure about the B1, however before I got my condensor I did quite a bit of work with an SM57, and my personal favorite position for it is pointing up towards the mouth, generally around 6" or so away. However I probably have a different voice than your singer, so your mileage may vary. Pick a spot and move it around, see what sounds the best. Also remember good singing techniques for mics: for those lows get up close, and the louder he gets make sure he moves away from the mic some more. Since I don't think you have any outboard compression, this makes it pretty imperative unless you've got some equipment with a really high cieling going into Sonar.
The mood of the song and a lot of other factors come into play when you're deciding what to add to the vocals--I generally like a drier mix (no John Fogerty Stuff), but I think it goes without saying that your vox will need at least some reverb. The easiest way to find the best reverb, I think, is to adjust all the settings when the mix is 100% wet so you hear almost no attack. When they're set like that, change your decay time, density, high/low cutoffs, etc, and then when you think you have what you like, adjust the wet/dry mix again until you find what you're looking for. Some more imperatives are usually at least a little compression/limiting (though depending on the song, you may be able to eek by without them if you have to), some gating (or you could just hand-delete all of the pauses between stanzas/verses/etc), and of course the EQ. Since you're mixing these into a full band, keep in mind that you want to minimize any extra sound from the tracks from frequencies you don't need--try enveloping the vocals below 80-100hz and it should mix better. You said you don't know much about compression--some googling will help you with that in no time. Just remember that too much compression can absolutely kill a track--I've lived and learned that one, as I'm sure most everyone here has. Just enough compression is what you're after. Another tip with the reverb now that I think about it is to make it sound more natural, if there's more than one vocal track, put the effect on an auxilary bus and route it through there, as opposed to directly into the fx bay of the track.
Maximizing the sound is a pretty broad question--just screw around with everything until it sounds good to you. Hell, even throw away everything I just typed if you need to. Just get it done, and have fun.