There is lots of talk and hype on the internet nowadays about keyword research tools for search engine optimization. One of the most popular SEO keyword tool is Market Samurai. It is a very popular choice against the competition such as SEO Elite, SEO Book, etc, mainly because it has a free trial. It does in seconds what used to take hours or days to compile in messy spreadsheets. Market Samurai has lots of features, but the two most basic things to understand how to use are the keyword research tool functions of the software. Using this feature, you will be light years ahead of what the free Google AdWords and AdSense external keyword tool gives you.

First let's discuss in detail how Market Samurai works as a keyword research tool. Once you have a keyword you are targeting, under the Keyword Research tab you can generate keywords. What is great here is that is used the actual free AdWords Google keyword tool, and if you put in your login info, Market Samurai will grab up to 800 keywords, straight from Google!

Once you have keywords, you want to go to the Keyword Analysis section, where you want to click "Analyze Keywords". After you analyze the keywords you will get your first bit of real useful information. It will list several columns here, the most important being SEOT, PBR, and SEOC. SEOT stands for "search engine optimization traffic" and what this number means is how much daily traffic the #1 position on Google would receive. In other words, if you maximize your efforts and rank #1, how much traffic you will get from that keyword. PBR is "phrase to broad ratio" which means the percentage of phrase match compared to broad match. In lay mans terms that means how unique is the keyword in terms of order of the keywords in the phrase. I know that sounds strange, but if you understand that a word doesn't rank the same for the order of the words, some do and some don't and the higher the PBR number the better.

Well, now you know understand the two most basic features of the Market Samurai keyword research tool. I hope you see now how this is so much more advanced already than the free Google AdWords keyword tool, which maybe SEO newbies think is the best keyword tool. Unfortunately, free tire kicking will never really get you the stuff you need to succeed. So make sure you enter in your Google AdWords ID in the "keyword research" section of your Market Samurai download, then "generate keywords". Next, scroll down to the left size and click "keyword analysis", and finally 'Analyze Keywords". Now you know that and what the columns mean, in other articles we will get into more in depth instruction on what to look for in these numbers, stay tuned!

Eric Stein wrote this article. If you want more SEO Lessons check out Eric's website at MonkSEO. To learn more of Eric's tips and tricks and get more knowledge of SEO, download his free SEO eBook "Awaken Your Inner SEO", and become enlightened today in the world of Search Engine Optimization!