ok made some very good progress with this, I've got the form searching and inserting a record to update a searchquery table.
the data going into the table though isn't just the keywords the user is searching, it's basically submitting the whole query into the database.
I tried to get it to take the input from my search field but that is returning null unfortunately.
I should have added that it needs to be just the keywords searched for by the user because I want to pull these into my footer using a recordset so that customers can see what other customers have searched on. Similar idea to a tag cloud.