Some of you who've been hanging around here for a while may remember my article on SEO. I really enjoy SEO and it's been fun this last week or so being able to start planning my strategies for the UserScape site.

I thought I'd share some information on a really cool tool Google has just launched which can REALLY help you with your SEO. First, to access the tool you'll need to have an Adwords account. You'll probably want one of these anyway for your business so go sign up. I think they only charge your credit card for $5 initially so it's not a big deal.

Now, when you finally get in go under the "campaign management" tab to "tools". Here you'll see the new top link is the Keyword Tool. This tool is just fantastic. What it does is allow you to put in a term you're optimizing for (or buying ads for) and it shows you other keywords which are similar that people search on. In addition, it shows you how often the term is searched (relative to others) and how much advertising competition there is for the term. Let's take a look:

Here you can see I ran "help desk software" through the tool. It returned several other more specific keywords to consider as well as some other related, but less exact options. The real value though is in the other two columns. We can see which terms are most searched on an interestingly which ones are most coveted by advertisers. Those full green bars for "help desk software" are why I won't be buying an ad campaign for that anytime soon!! Prices often reach $30 A CLICK.

SEO however is free and this is a great tool for researching the focus of your SEO efforts. It's also a good tool for figuring out how competitive the organic listings are and hence how difficult it will be to rank high for different words. As you can imagine, with that much advertiser interest the term "help desk software" is probably highly competitive for organic listings. On the other hand the tool can help expose where there may be opportunities to optimize for less competitive phrases that can still be profitable.