To me there is nothing more important in this racket than keyword research. I’ve got crap sites that have zero PR that get found in Google or other search engines and somehow still makes a dollar or two with Adsense a day. Two years after building the sites. And all it took was getting the right keywords back then. I haven’t touched those sites since.

Today I use two things to get the right keyword phrases, Nichebot, which I’ve made no secret is my weapon of choice and my server logs. That’s right, my server logs.

Every month I take inventory of how the heck people get to my site. On one webhost I use the simple Awstats and pull the top 5 or 10 keyword phrases. Another webhost doesn’t use Awstats. Bastards says its too server intensive or some such nonsense. So I download the logs and evaluate them with a desktop log analyzer tool. Much better than Awstats anyway.

I’m constantly amazed at what I find. People will surf to my site with keywords that I swear I never consciously targeted. But if they land in the top 5 or 10 for the month, in my weblogs, you can bet I’ll be using them in the future. I’ll puke them back up to my site in the form of an article or post.

Oh, and those NPB sites that are still churning a dollar or two a day in Adsense? I mine those weblogs too. Makes for great keyword research to use on legit articles and postings.