Before setting up a website, you have to find out how popular it is on the web. The reason being, if the topic is a flop, it’s not worth even building a website on it. This may sound very simplistic, but if no one is interested in the topic, chances are very few will land on your website.

If you want to build a website on wallpaper, but that keyword got only 1000 searches last month, I wouldn’t waste my time on anything related remotely to wallpaper. The main keyword wallpaper doesn’t even get enough hits, let alone the more specific sub-topics on wallpaper.

For most websites, you want something that gets tens of thousands of hits on the main base keyword and at least a few thousand on your niche website based off the main keyword. For example, if you were doing a baseball team blog the main keyword would be “baseball blog”. Your specific keyword you are targeting for your team website, would be “[teamname] blog”. Remember, it will take months or years to get high ranking for the keywords you want. In the meantime, you will be getting searches from mainly the less popular longer keyword phrases, that usually will land on your individual pages inside your website.

Once you have found that popular topic that interests you, then you can build your website’s content, title, and domain(maybe) around that keyword. Choosing a domain is tricky decision and isn’t always based on SEO or keyword popularity. Sometimes a memorable domain name is the best way to go long term. Use the Adwords Tool that shows how often each keyword was searched in Google search engine on average per month.

After you have figured out the topic of your website and figured out which keyword gets the most searches, you’re probably thinking now you are ready to build your website and register your domain. Well, not so fast! There is one other thing to you have to research before you are done. You need to find out your competition. Type your keyword into Google and find out how many website results show up in number. Ideally, you want to focus your website (and maybe your domain) around a keyword that is searched a lot, but there isn’t as many websites that show up in results. Often the medium volume searched keywords are better because the ratio of searched words to websites is higher. Too many webmasters overlook this and simply go for the main keyword. If you pick a less popular keyword but there is much less websites on it, that means there is a higher chance of them coming to your website. If you want to shoot for the stars and go for the most competitive term be warned. You’ll have a very tough time ever getting enough high rank in the search engines to have a shot at getting a large piece of their traffic. It’s possible, but takes a lot of SEO work.

So in summary, the most popular searched keyword is not necessarily the best one. Sometimes picking a less searched keyword that has less website competition, is better than the most popular keyword on that topic. You will have to calculate each keyword as a ratio and find out which one has the most favorable ratio. Once you have done all this to find the best keyword, create your website(and maybe domain) around that keyword.