Google Keywords tool

There are many interesting things I learn from my internet marketing class this week. Usually free useful application is what I'm interested, so "Google Keywords Tools" somewhat capture my attention.

First, I find a VDO on Youtube about the tool from ClaudePelanne [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpEw_npG3qQ&feature=related] which is interesting and easy to understand. Then I go to the site [www.google.com/sktool] and try it myself. Since I have a friend in Thailand who wants to start selling an accounting software for small business online and the Google keyword tool is capable for Thai lanuage (Wow!), I choose "โปรแกรม บัญชี" (which is "Accounting program" in English) to be a keyword for my first try. I found quite a couple different words that people uses when searching for accounting program. I record those words since they might be useful to for boost my friend ranking on search engine sites.
What I do next is click the word "accounting program" and choose to see the data between 2004 and present. The tool shows me the trend of this keyword "โปรแกรม บัญชี" which is kind of scary since the curve is falling.

Since Google keyword tool also has a list of popular keywords, my second query is "โหลด โปรแกรม บัญชี" (which is "download accounting program"). The curve surprises me with its climbing up trend.
Some takeaways from my Google Keywords tool exploration is that:
1. It provides you a set of popular keywords you could use to create your content or website to boost your search engine ranking.
2. It provides you partial view of industry. For example, the climbing trend of keyword "download accounting program" could imply that online software market is growing.
3. The tool has options that you can choose to restrict data to only some regions/areas or a certain period of time. In this case, I restrict the search to only Thailand.
4. It estimates the cost of Google Adwords for each set of keywords, so if you want to do some Adwords you can get an idea of how much it will cost.