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It depends a lot on what options are used when it's mounted, but in general, yes, you should make sure it's unmounted before you remove it. Mounting is usually asynchronous, which means that the file transfers are not instantaneous, but get held in a buffer for a time before the actual writing is done. If you remove the device before the transfers are complete, then you risk corrupting the data and/or the file system. And there might be other subsystems that can get confused as well if they think a drive is there when it isn't.
If you mounted it with the regular "mount" command, then, yes, use the "umount" command to unmount it. Most distros these days have automounting systems in place though, which can (ironically) be a bit more complex to work with. I don't know exactly how Suse does it's automounting, but my guess is it uses some form of HAL and hotplug combination. Unlike the regular mount command, these don't put entries into your mtab file, so the regular unmount command probably doesn't work. There should be an unmount/remove safely command in your graphic interfaces, and you can use the "pmount" and "pumount" commands in the shell.
Finally, "mount -a" is not a useful command in this circumstance. The -a flag will attempt to mount all entries in fstab at once (unless flagged with 'noauto'), something you're certainly not interested in doing just for the sake of a single usb device.
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