Your server logs (and website analytics) will always be the best place to mine for new keyword opportunities you may be unaware of.

For monitoring keyword rank there are quite a few options, and it just depends on what you're looking for. If you're like me, the Pro service here with weekly updates is too slow. SEScout.com has hourly updates and is usually very accurate. They have free acounts available that are good for tracking projects with 10 or less keywords.

Like pretty much any SaaS though, they can get expensive when you want to track hundreds or thousands of keywords on a regular basis. That's where software tracking is usually a better choice, such as RankTracker. I've more accuracy problems with this program for local listings, but for non-localized SEO it's great.

If you want keyword ideas based on speculative data, then SpyFu Recon is pretty neat. However, in order for it to really be of any use, you need to have a site that's already pulling in some decent traffic for its keywords.

Since .com domains are assumed to be targeting the United States by default, you don't need to do anything to target American searchers beyond having a site that is in English and is linked to from other English websites. There are a few reasons you'd ban visitors based on IP/location, but none of them have to do with improving rankings.

These include:

• You have different a different site for international locales (you would want a 301 redirect, not an IP ban)
• You want to prevent forum/blog spam (Cloudflare would be a much better alternative than doing this manually)
• Legal reasons people from a specific location shouldn't be accessing your site or page - the only legitimate reason I can think of to ban large blocks of IPs