A site I created in 2004 ranks very well for literally thousands of keywords and phrases. Some of these are not very competitive, while others return 2,000,000 to 5,000,000 results on Google. (At one time, Google was showing that one of my pages ranked #1 out of 47,000,000 results; I think they were inflating _their_ numbers ;).

The 2004 site is in a much less competitive search market niche than my new site.

I realize that I can't just expect to get ranked on the first page for terms that return tens of millions of results on Google. But I'm trying to figure out which "long-tail" keywords and phrases can be effective.

As an example, I did a search for "widget service," and Google returned 294,000 results. When I pluralized the phrase to "widget services," Google returned about 3,500,000 results.

In both cases, I noticed that there were Adwords ads.

With some long-tail keywords and phrases I've been researching, I notice that there aren't any Adwords results. Does this mean that the word or phrase isn't worth pursuing?

My intention isn't to create a site solely for Adsense. I intend to use CJ or another affiliate as well, or maybe I won't do Adsense at all.

Any suggestions, insights, criticisms are much appreciated.