Many of the keyword sources you could use to pull keywords for PPC or even for optimizing pages for natural search provide data in a format that’s difficult to use. Aaron Wall over at SEOBook just created a new free keyword cleaning tool that makes it super easy to grab a list of keywords from just about any public source, clean it up, and sort it in order of which terms have the greatest potential value.

HOT TIP: Use Aaron’s tool in combination with the FREE keyword grabber tool I blogged about last week. NEW - Hottest Free Keyword Tool Ever - Catch this Video! OK, so here’s a little bit about how Aaron’s free keyword cleaning tool works.

Step 1: Get a List of Keywords - Grab keywords from any of the following free sources.
.:. SpyFU - scrapes Google - shows where sites have ranked & what keywords they buy
.:. URL Trends - scrapes Google and shows where sites have ranked for some keywords
.:. Wordtracker’s free version
.:. Keyword Discovery’s free version
.:. Google’s Keyword tool - lists keywords based on a word, a site in general, or a specific web page
.:. Overture
.:. Related keyword suggestions from search engines or your server logs

Step 2: Use the SEObook Tool to Clean Up Your List - The keyword list cleansing tool offers 4 functions: make alphanumeric, strip numbers, strip poorly targeted words, strip any phrase containing a certain bad or untargeted word.

Go here to grab the SEOBook free keyword cleaning tool and get all the info about how to use it. Here’s Aaron’s blog about it if you want to comment or ask questions.