Indicator for Ranking Easily

I've been going through various keywords and I've hit a few keywords where Squidoo pages, EzineArticles and HubPages rank in the top 5 or 6. Without looking at the specifics, does this generally indicate very weak competition - i.e. if I found 100 keywords where I see one of these three sites ranking in the top 5, would it be safe to say 80-90% of these terms will be easy to rank for?

not neccesarily; check the backlinks in yahoo site explorer

Download a software called $Traffic Travis$

Its for free to use (with limited use) or you can probably get the pro version free here on the forum somewhere.

Not using any tools, the first thing that I would do is type into google - allintitle: keyword

This will give you how many websites are using that keyword phrase in their title and how much competition you have for that keyword - title competition.

Second do a search for that keyword in google - "keyword" if this number is low that is good. The lower the better.

Third, when using google keyword tool you want the competition to be high. The higher the competition the more advertisers that there are for that keyword.

I highly suggest you get Market Samurai. There is quite a few free copies here.

Then you need to check the backlinks of the competition. A squidoo page with great SEO and Backlinks is going to be very difficult to out rank, because squidoo is an authority site and building an authority page on that site is quite useful.

Also, on an ending note, if you can find an exact match .com domain, then usually, not always, but usually the keyword would be relatively easy to rank for. This is not knowing the competition at all though.

It's a pretty good indicator. I have a column for the number of these types of pages ranking in my keywords database and it's pretty useful.

Like someone else said, if you come across a high ranking one of these, check the backlinks in yahoo. If there's not much or just internal links it's a really good sign. If it looks like someone used xrumer, it's still a sign that someone spammed their way to the top.

Same goes for the exact match domains because those can rank easily if there is very little competition. With these it's still important to make sure that it's the exact match that's giving it the edge and not the backlinks or maybe the domain age.

If you are using firefox you should install seo quake toolbar in the add ons. Every pages you look at if gives you quick easy to understand statistics about how many links to the page domain age etc.