By no means do I purport to be any kind of "Vegas Insider", but I did go there last July. For hotels, I found the best deals by spending a little extra time and going through each hotel's website to look for all of the current deals that they were offering. I don't think that a lot of those deals (free breakfast, free room upgrade, free spa credit, etc) would show up on sites like travelocity. You've got an idea of where you want to stay, and an idea of what kind of budget you're working under, so pull up a map of Las Vegas and zoom in on all of the different hotels that fit what you want. Then go to their website and put in the dates you're going and it should pull up all of the options that you have for those dates - different room types and prices, different specials/deals, etc. It takes a little bit extra time, but not much, and you're catching all of the deals that might interest you but might not show up on a 3rd party site.
As for me... After all the searching, I ended up staying at Harrahs for around $35/night. It wasn't nearly as nice as my buddys' rooms, who were staying at the Trump, and at the Venetian, but I was only in the room when I was asleep (and maybe I was inebriated when I got in each evening), so the room was clean, the bed was comfortable, so I was happy. Plus I had extra money for gambling, drinking, sightseeing, etc. But, as with most things, you're preferences might be different than mine!