Tell Tale Signs you can rank easy?

What are some tell tale signs you can rank easily without even checking backlinks? By rank easy, I mean be able to shoot 50 links and let er go.

I see for a couple of my keywords I'm researching, I see Youtube videos like in the #2 position. I was thinking that's a pretty good sign, as well as maybe a forum post?

I still have no "plan" when it comes to researching competition, just looking at backlinks and pr and saying welp, doesn't look "too bad" and I go for it. If exact matches are under 60k.

Thanks.

my simplest method of checking mass competition is using the footprint "allintitle: "Keyword" in google and judging by how many results there are. This shows the amount of webpages that are using the keyword in their title, IE. websites that know the very very basics of SEO... once I narrow down my mass list I check the top 5 positions for that keyword for its PR, backlinks to page and inurl keyword with traffic Travis. Market samurai free edition can speed up this process with its filtering mechanisims, however, recently I have found it to be inaccurate.

Hope this helps, PM me for more info if you want