Vitaliy Gershfeld

Link juice is a measure of how many clicks your site gets via a search engine and how many clicks it gets internally. The more it gets, the better your SEO.

That’s basically what it is as a whole, but there’s specific areas on your site which you can optimize to improve the most important areas where link juice (more clicks) matters for SEO and that’s what I will help you do.

Here’s 3 examples of how link juice (LJ) plays a role in SEO:

1) 100 people look up the same keyword on Google, and 10 website results show up on the first page. One of those 10 websites gets more clicks than the other 9 and therefore, that page will receive more LJ and that’ll help the rankings for that site grow.

2) There are 2 competing websites, both in the same field, but one does a few things extra (internally) to improve it’s clicks and as a result and it gets more clicks and visitors touring their site. Because this is measured by Google, they reward that site more vs the other.

3) You own a website and know it ranks for at least 1 keyword on the first page results, but you decide to look up the same search on say a phone, to check it it’s also ranked that high there. You find that it is and click it. That sends LJ to your site too.

The common thing between ALL 3 of these scenarios is that the more clicks the site gets, the better it ranks. But while the last one is pretty clear (doing a manual mobile search and clicking your site), the other 2 aren’t clear…

• What is that the 1 site out of the other 9 in the first example is doing to get more clicks?
• What is that the 1 site out of the other competing one is also doing right in the second example to also get more clicks?

I left those details out on purpose because that’s what I will be showing you in the 5 ways to get more LJ to your site and as you read them, you will probably be able to figure out exactly what was going on those 2 examples. 

5 ways to get more LJ to your site and it’s pages.

1) Improve your meta titles. 

A better looking blog or page title has an important role to play in that because it’s better looking, it’s easier for people to be attracted to it and because of that, they are more likely to click it if they see it on a search engine or within your site.

Here are a few examples of optimized titles that before they were changed looked boring, but upon updating, are now more likely to get clicked and remember, more clicks = more LJ:

As you can see, the green titles are far more attractive and there was honestly very little editing involved. Just a few changes and suddenly the appeal and attractiveness of the title is several times greater than before.

Well when you take the green versions of those titles into account, what do you think will happen when say…100 people see those titles vs the red versions of them? I’m certain MORE people will click the green titles and you absolutely WANT that to happen.

For page titles, be sure to optimize it for SEO and here’s how.

2) Improve your first paragraph (the snippet).

I’ve talked about what is known as meta descriptions before and why they are, like titles VERY important for SEO. Your goal with the first paragraph of your post or page is to make it short, make it appealing and in context with the title. 

That first paragraph will become the snippet Google (Bing, and other search engines) shows in it’s results and just like the more improved titles led to more clicks, the snippet is also another thing you want to have optimized because it will lead to more clicks too:

3) Improve your internal linking strategies. 

Remember, LJ isn’t just how many clicks your site gets through a search engine, it’s also how many clicks the links WITHIN your site get, as that is also an important SEO ingredient, so some of these strategies, such as this one will involve making changes and updates within your site’s pages…

Specifically, what we’re going here is we’re adding more internal links within out site to other pages we have. Now besides this being good for SEO on it’s own, there’s also an attractive way to do it right, just like with the other 2 tips above…

In this case, what we’re aiming to do is improve the look of our anchor text (the text which points to the page), so it’s “clickable” for people. The more clickable it is, the more likely a visitor will click it, visit the other page and send that other page more LJ.

When it comes to internal linking, I have 2 examples of how I prefer you do it…

The first example is this: Since one of my above strategies was talking about improving your first paragraph, here is one article that helps you do it.

Notice the anchor text there. Does that look attractive?

If not, then I offer you a second example…

Once again, I’m going to offer you the same context, about improving the first paragraph, but in this case, I’ve got an awesome strategy for making magnetic paragraphs.

Now as you can see, both examples point to the same page, but which anchor text looked more appealing? The second of course and the more you use this sort of strategy within your site when pointing to other pages, the more link juice those other pages will get.

Now I also want to mention that you can absolutely use this strategy for the comments on your site, meaning you can edit them and have certain words be anchor text to point to another page. 

Also do NOT underestimate the POWER of internal linking folks, it’s huge for traffic and other things revolving around SEO. Here’s 7 reasons why it’s so huge.

4) Improve your external linking strategies. 

External linking happens within your site, but it points to external sites. You want to do this because Google loves off page SEO strategies like these and you want to do it the exact same way I showed you how to do it internally, in terms of making great looking anchor text that people want to click on.

5) Improve your images so they get more clicks.

Images themselves can be edited to become a link to something, whether it be for internal or external SEO reasons, but the point here is also that you want to get more of those clicks so you can get more LJ. 

One of the BEST ways I’ve found to make this work is this: 

Let’s go back to the 2 examples for a quick moment…

We’re going to finish this up by going back to the 2 examples I gave you where I left out details on purpose, but now that you saw 5 strategies for getting more LJ, I think you’ll be able to better guess how those 2 examples work. And I’ll help you there:

In the first example of the 1 site beating out the other 9 for clicks on the search engine, it’s because it had a better title and a better snippet. That attracted people to it better and that’s why it got more clicks.

In the second example, the reason 1 site got better SEO results was because it did better internal and external linking (and good, clickable images were also there), while the other didn’t.

Because of that, the first site was much easier to navigate and explore for visitors and search engines. I hope these 5 strategies for improving link juice across your site made sense and if you use them on your website, you’ll also see improved SEO results.

Most people don’t know what dofollow links are (or how important they are for SEO), but I’ll show how to use them the right way and make you an expert quickly.

The funny thing is that this subject kind of handles itself because if you own a blog and do any sort of SEO for it, you really don’t need to worry about this, and you’re going to quickly see this…

What is a dofollow link (DFL)?

It is ANY regular link (no editing involved) you create on your site or blog that points to another page, internal (within your site) or external (to another site). For example…

• If I create a link to another blog post on this site (internal linking).
• If I create a link to an external site like Google, a specific YouTube video, basically any site that goes outside mine…

Then it’ll count and be a DFL. You or I literally do not need to do anything other than create the link on our blog or site and point to the another site or blog post and it’ll already carry that DFL label.

It is only when we want to create nofollows that we have to do some editing, but that’s another topic, with it’s own logic, circumstances and explanation which I covered the other day here. But that’s also an issue you will possibly never have to worry about either.

What makes DFL’s so important for SEO?

For any site that is doing SEO, it is constantly getting “crawled” by Google spiders (as well as other search engine spiders). These things examine your site, your blog, the content on it and in the context of this particular subject, they will examine the DFLs you have on your site.

• They will examine the DFLs you created that point to other pages and blogs on the site (internal).
• They will examine the DFLs you created that point to pages, sites and blogs OUTSIDE your own site (external). 

Then what will happen is, since these things are going to have the DFL attached to it, the spiders will crawl the pages that you are pointing to and examine those too.

Quite literally, the term “Do. Follow” is a command to the search engine spiders to follow the DFL you created to the page, blog post or site.

And this command is also in HTML form, so the regular reader doesn’t see this, nor will they ever know it in most cases.

There are great advantages to this for SEO:

1) If you are internally pointing to other pages on your site, and they are getting crawled, that will help increase the ranking of THOSE pages too. This strategy literally gets you more exposure on Google, because more pages are being crawled, thus more pages are being ranked and therefore, more potential eyes will now see the site on Google and be drawn to it.

It also helps your visitor’s experience grow, which itself also carries SEO weight. 

Just imagine someone landing on your site but without proper linking strategies, not really being able to get a good tour or experience of it. With good internal DFLs, they can explore your site better and this will not only help their experience improve, but it’ll also show Google that you care about giving your visitors a better experience. 

In fact, just take my SEO site and see how many DFLs I’ve included on this very page and frankly on most of the other pages I have on this site (browse my blog here).

This allows the person reading one of my pages to be able to click through and read the other/s and it also allows Google’s spiders to crawl those other pages too and boost my rankings up.

ANY blogger who is doing SEO should ALSO be doing this in a similar way that I am. Notice that throughout this article, I am not providing DFLs just anywhere, but in specific areas.

2) If you are externally pointing to other pages, sites and blogs outside your website, and as long as those places are good, high value sites, the Google spiders will crawl those places too, award them more SEO points and you will also get credit for pointing to them.

Take the same user who lands on your site, but now change up the viewing experience from seeing more of your site, to seeing other, good sites that improve their browsing experience.

The only downside here is that they would likely leave your site in the process, but at the same time, Google does like it when you do this, because it shows that you aren’t being greedy and are trying to give your viewers the best experience.

Some people use this strategy to point to affiliate promotions, while others use it to point to sites that do not compensate them in anyway, and for SEO, if you do the latter, you will be rewarded more for it.

Also with regards to traffic leaving the site, a good SEO tip I can offer you is to make sure your external links have the option of opening “in a new window”.

What will happen when this is set is that when people click on whichever outside site you’re pointing to, they will at least still have YOUR site’s window open to return back to.

If you don’t have this set, then what will happen is, when people leave your page, they will likely never come back to it, at least in this instance, there’s a chance, they’ll keep your window open and return.

3) If other sites are pointing to you, then this is also a good way to gather more SEO points and this last part is actually where we have to talk about backlinking because the whole premise behind it is that by getting dofollow’s from other sites to yours, you can grow your ranking on Google.

This is not really true anymore because the actual SEO value of this stuff varies a lot. Fortunately, I took a lot of time to explain that here and you will truly understand when this strategy works and when it doesn’t.

Basically, just because a blog or site points it’s visitors to yours doesn’t guarantee a higher ranking on Google. It MIGHT if the circumstances are right, and like I said, that article will explain those circumstances in detail.

Do I really need to worry about whether I’m making DFLs or not?

In most cases and I literally mean like 99% of them, don’t even bother worrying about this and just as I said at the very top, this handles itself.

It’s just that a lot of people like to dig deep into SEO subjects and there’s many people and blogs that like to get into microscopic details of it, and that can actually confuse and scare people, and DFL are a subject of SEO that gets that reaction in my experience.

I just wanted to give you an in-depth explanation on this whole dofollow topic so you understand it better, but at the same time don’t end up complicating it. Just remember…

Every regular link you create is already a DFL.

The ONLY time/s you would need to turn a regular DFL into a nofollow one would be in the following circumstances I explained here. Basically, any duplicate pages or questionable pages you point to, just read that article and you’ll see what I mean.

But if you’re doing SEO, you’re going to want to point to other pages on your site and to other sites outside of yours and that itself will already be a DFL which you’ll want to have up anyway.

Let me also admit to something:

In the many years I’ve done SEO and made websites, NOT ONCE have I ever made a nofollow link, not on this site, not on any, ever. I just don’t see the point in it, and I just make regular ones (which are already DFLs) because those actually carry the SEO value, which is what I want.

You will also likely find yourself using the same strategy if you own a blog or site and are doing SEO. So in the end, I wouldn’t even concern yourself with if a link is a DFL or a nofollow one. Just link in a way that makes your content better to read and that is what will help with the SEO of the site.

I don’t worry about using nofollow links on any SEO focused site I run. The reason is that if you look at how this has all evolved, it’s value has downgraded.

This happens to be a topic where I know for a fact that many other SEO people will probably disagree with me but I’m going to make a strong case. First, let me explain the details of this particular thing, it’s history with regards to rankings and then explain why I say it has little value…

What is a nofollow link?

It’s basically a link (pointing to) you put within the content of your site (anchor text for instance), that goes to another site, but you don’t want Google spiders to “follow” it, crawl the other site, and give the other site SEO value.

I’ll explain in a moment the logic behind that strategy, but first…

Here is an example:

Say for instance, I’m talking about SEO on a page like this, and I decide to externally point to a Wikipedia page (just like that) that talks about it too. That’s actually an excellent way to do what is known as off page SEO, but that’s not the point.

By default, the link I just provided to Wikipedia above will send people to the site and will be count as a dofollow (it’s just a default thing, I don’t have to anything). So once Google scans my page and sees the pointing to the Wikipedia page, they are going to crawl it.

As a result, Wikipedia will get an extra backlink point from my site because of that. 

However, if I were to edit the same Wikipedia link, and add a “nofollow” to it, then Wikipedia would not get any extra points from me, because naturally, I just said I don’t want Google to crawl that. 

What’s the logic behind using and not using nofollow anyway?

There’s a few circumstances to consider in which this makes sense to use:

1) Say you have a landing page with a lot of affiliate links on it.

Typically, if you do too much of this on a landing page, it looks more like spam to Google and seeing that, they may not want to rank your landing page high. By updating the same affiliate links on the landing page and making them “nofollow”, you can TECHNICALLY omit the negative SEO effects because Google will not count them and see them as spam. 

2) Perhaps the site you’re pointing to is of poor quality or has malware & other bad things on it.

Not that you would ever want to do this if you were doing SEO, but people mistakenly or purposely still do it. This situation occurs in cases where people try to promote programs on their site that point to pages like torrent sites or low quality affiliate pages that may have spam, pop ups, malware and other bad things. 

Without adding a nofollow to these things, Google may see your page as a poor third party site trying to promote bad sites as well, and thus they may penalize you for that.

And frankly, I am totally for that, why would you want to send people to sites that harm them or their laptops and phones? In that case, your site SHOULD be punished.

But in any case, people who practice this, in an attempt to omit this scenario, make those links to the bad sites, nofollow ones, and thus Google TECHNICALLY (I will be explaining why I keep capitalizing this word shortly) won’t hold your site accountable for sending traffic there.

3) You have duplicate pages and posts on your site that you do not want Google to see.

Pretty much any serious site that does SEO needs to have at least a privacy policy and/or affiliate disclosure page where they explain if and how they are compensated. It’s normal policy and in some cases, it’s law. 

But these particular pages have their own protocol in that there’s a certain, suggested way they be set up and people simply auto generate them from free sources or copy them from other sites and fill in the blanks such as their site name and other things.

Basically, all that legal jargon is duplicated by many people, across many sites and duplicate content is something that you should NEVER allow Google to index or crawl, thus…

You should make the privacy policy, affiliate disclosure page and ANY page where you have duplicate content not possible to get crawled or indexed by Google. 

And second, to avoid any problems, just don’t point any page on your site to those pages that are duplicated.

But if you decide to do it (again, I strongly suggest against it), make them nofollows.

Now I want to explain why those 3 points matter very little…

So pretty much every point I made about the value of using nofollow, in reality, has very little value today and it goes back to the main point I was making earlier. 

The reason I even put them up was because there’s still many people say these same things and make the same exact case for using this stuff on your site. I just wanted to list them as well because I am about to explain why their uses actually have very little uses…

Here’s the main reason why there’s little value in all of this:

If you look at Google and how they are judging this particular thing (their official policy on this), you will see the following:

Google says they generally respect when someone creates a nofollow link, but the keyword is “generally” and they may have situations where they don’t honor that from what I understood and it totally makes sense. Here’s why:

If you look at my first point about a landing page using too many affiliate promotions, even if you make them all nofollow, Google can still count them as the opposite and punish you for it. This is probably because there’s more to consider here, such as the value of the page being lower if you try to spam promotions on it.

If you look at the second point about pointing to poor quality sites, once again, they may choose to count that you’re sending traffic to bad sites and punish your site for it. And why not? You’re not making the internet safer with this practice, so your site should be punished, despite you trying to hedge against that Google penalty.

And finally, for the last point, you may choose to send traffic to duplicated pages (I advise not doing it), and think you’re safe from a penalty, but Google can still choose to count that against you. 

So what’s the safest approach to all of this? 3 tips:

1) Stop worrying about whether you should make a link a nofollow or not. If you’re going to send traffic to external pages, make sure those pages are high quality, period.

I would never send my traffic to a site which has the potential to hack them or give them malware. I would however be 100% confident in sending my traffic to truly safe pages like Wikipedia and in regards to affiliate programs, I’d make sure those affiliate programs are legitimate before sending my traffic there.

2) For the affiliate thing, just don’t spam your site or landing pages with them, it’s really not that hard. 

3) And once again, for pages that are duplicated (privacy policy, affiliate disclosure, ect…), just DON’T send traffic there, leave those pages up on your site so they can be clearly be seen, by both your visitors and Google, but don’t point people to them across your other existing pages.

And for extra safety, make the duplicate pages themselves unable to be indexed by Google. I simply use the All in One SEO plugin which allows all of my pages and posts to have these boxes show up that stop Google from indexing them:

In the end, because Google ultimately decides if they want to honor your request to give a link you provide value or not (in spite of you labeling it a nofollow or not), you are best off not even worrying about it (this is why I said technically in caps earlier) and making sure you aren’t doing anything bad to begin with.

In that case, you won’t even have to worry about any of this stuff which is why I will say it again, this whole thing has lost most of it’s SEO value.

There are big differences between SEO and SEM and I have seen many people incorrectly assume both terms are the same. They are related, but not the same.

Here’s all you really need to know:

• SEO is a term used to describe ranking and marketing on a specific search engine. 
• SEM is a term used to describe multiple or ALL the ways you do can market on every search engine there is as a WHOLE. 

It’s sort of like saying an athlete who knows one sport, vs an athlete who knows multiple sports.

Here is an example of SEM:

How many search engines do you know exist?

Most would probably be able to name at least 3 and Google would be one of them. Well there happen to be more than 3 and social media sites like Facebook also technically count as search engines because you can look up different things in their search bar, besides people. 

Whatever the case is, there are many, and on each of them exists it’s own way that one can market sites on them. You can try to rank organically on each of these search engine and you can even create ads to also do the same thing.

Well SEM basically encompasses numerous and even all the ways you can market on every single search engine that’s out there so when someone says they are an “expert” in this field, assume that they know multiple ways to market on different search engines. 

Here’s specific examples:

An SEM expert could be someone who knows…

Adwords, Adsense, Bing marketing, social media marketing, ect…

These are all different platforms across different search engines and each has their own marketing techniques. I am an SEM expert because I know about marketing in different ways across different search engines and methods.

With SEO, it’s a very specific branch of SEM:

With this topic, you’re limited to pretty much marketing websites organically on the 3 main search engines, and Google is the main one. But the good news is that properly using SEO on Google will itself automatically help with that same stuff on other search engines. See an example.

Now that’s not a bad thing at all, considering how HUGE of an industry this is and how much money can be made from it if you understand it.

My experiences with people who have done both things.

It’s very hard to become an expert in these particular topics and I have read, spoken to and listened to the advice of people in both fields, and I have to say that most of the time, the experts aren’t really experts.

When I read what they write, or what they say through a video or in person, I can tell just by the text or words, how experienced the individual is and based on the experiences I’ve had, maybe about 20% of all people who say they are experts in one or both fields, and actually be that…

Usually the people who aren’t good, will VERY broadly explain what they do and frankly, being that are supposed to be”marketers”, you’d think they’d know how to relay their job titles in a way that was more attractive but they don’t…

A simple quiz for you: Can you tell which is SEO and which is SEM? 

I’m going to give you 10 different scenarios and the idea is simple, just respond with whether the scenario is related to one topic or the other…

1) A person says they make websites and rank them organically on Google.

What would you say the person does here? If you say it’s either one or the other, you’d be right, but specifically, it’s SEO.

2) A person makes websites and then markets them on Google Adwords. 

This would be an example of SEM then. Anything with ads and paying for them on search engines would also count as this.

3) A person runs ads on social media sites like Facebook.

This isn’t Google anymore, so what would the answer be? It would still be SEM because there is paid online advertising going on, despite it being on a social media site.

4) A person tries to rank sites organically on Bing.

This would most definitely be SEO and the keyword there is “organically”. As long as you see that word and it’s in relation to search engines, that answer will always apply.

5) A person tries to rank organically on DuckDuckGo.

If you’ve never heard of this place, it’s also a search engine. It’s not gigantic, but it has a growing number of users because it doesn’t track them while giving them the same kinds of searching experiences and results Google would.

Either way, if someone were to market on this search engine, it would also be the same answer as #4.

6) A person tries to market on Yahoo (organically).

You saw that keyword again, so you should already know what form of marketing it is (same as #4, and #5).

7) A person creates an organic social media account (a fan page).

This is a trick question and the answer is that it’s SEM because there’s literally no organic search engine marketing going on here. It’s a social media account and usually people who have these will use paid advertising to drive people to it to grow the page.

8) A person runs Google Adsense on their site.

In this example, the answer is NEITHER. Why? Because you’re literally not marketing in ANYWAY on a search engine, you’re marketing on your website, which is completely different.

9) A person gathers emails on their site.

Same exact answer as #8 (neither), because again, the marketing is WITHIN the website, not on a search engine.

10) A person sends emails to their subscribers, across Gmail, Hotmail, ect…

Again, this is an example of neither, but the only difference is that it’s not within a search engine or within one’s site, it’s on email platforms, which count as neither, but that too has it’s own marketing strategies.

So many options, where should someone start?

With all the various ways one can market online, it’s easy to be at a crossroads in choosing where to start. I personally began with marketing on a popular site (not a search engine), but then later moved into doing SEO more seriously and I recommend it be the starting point for most people. 

If you can learn how to market organically on say a search engine like Google, then the great news is that the results you have trickle across other search engines and give you more results that way, being that Google is #1.

You’re welcome to ask me where the best place to start would be if you’re considering getting into it 🙂

In just about 100% of cases, making a one page website will not result in great SEO rankings on Google. There are however, extremely rare cases where it can work.

And I’ll explain it all. The most major reason why this simply won’t happen anymore is because SEO has grown and evolved to a point where these types of websites will just not cut it anymore.

Even if it’s optimized as best as it can be for SEO (here are 10 optimization tips), then without other pages to boost it and other factors, it won’t mean or rank for anything that would bring you traffic.

Now I may get some old school SEO people reading this article who haven’t exactly been keeping up with the updates Google has been consistently putting up for years, asking me about an old strategy that used to work for this topic and that basically came down to doing this:

• Create an EMD domain targeting a keyword.
• Create a single page targeting that keyword. 
• Sending “link juice” through the form of backlinks.

That actually had merit many years ago and believe me, many people took notice and action of that. But…

Would that work today? No. 

Here’s what would work today:

That’s already a requirement that many people “cannot” meet and this is actually a big reason why so many people who used to do SEO the simple way back then, have opted out and said it’s dead. And while that’s not true, what is true is that it’s just too difficult for them to meet these new requirements.

I honestly don’t think it’s a problem, and have evolved my efforts so I meet those demands and thus, I have succeeded in SEO as a result (ask me your questions). The fact that most people can’t do the above things, to me signals laziness and from all the excuses I’ve heard from people, it usually falls under that term. 

Now I want to clear up a point which is, if you go the single page route, you WILL actually rank, perhaps for several keywords even, but that is only a few parameters out of many that needs to be met if you wish to get better rankings and that’s what you need to understand about this subject.

What about the rare cases? What did you mean specifically?

There are 3 situations in which it is possible for this formula to “still work”, but there’s a catch to each one as you’ll see:

One of them involves doing this…

If you can somehow find one or more people who own their own authority sites and have a major following, and are willing to link back to you (or let you do a guest post for them), perhaps for money or maybe if you’re friendly, then that action can actually lead to better SEO results.

However, that strategy has a very short term success period because if you’re in this business, the only reason you’d want to rank high on Google would be for a keyword that can get you loads of traffic.

And if that’s the case, then you can bet that there will constantly be new competition you’d have to contend with and eventually, if your site doesn’t update and follow the strategies above, you WILL be overtaken and drowned out by other competitors who ARE doing the things I mentioned. It is 100% inevitable.

It’s a lost cause in the long run, and that’s considering you even make this strategy work, even for a little. 

The other thing is…

Creating a page for a keyword that isn’t popular or even known about at all. Typically this happens when you create a business and then make a domain name that is that business. 

Should the domain name be something unusual, then odds are a simple one page site WILL rank high, for the keyword which is your domain and business name, but unless that business has name recognition and popularity, it’s a safe bet that nobody will ever Google it.

Now there is an add on to consider which is if that site and business gains recognition from online and offline sources, then people will start to Google it and will find it, and in that case, you will have a successfully ranking 1 page website, but only for that keyword.

And the final thing is…

Newly popular topics and products. These come out all the time and in rare circumstances, if there aren’t people or promoters hearing about it until it’s release, you may have a small opening in time to make a one page promotion and rank for that topic or product VERY briefly before the competition comes in and overtakes your rankings.

The reason this would work at first is because if all the perfect circumstances are met (that is highly unlikely), there will literally be a few or no pages competing against you and with an open field, you’ll easily rank on Google. 

But that small time gap will ALWAYS vanish quickly if the topic or product is popular enough, because it WILL attract bloggers, promoters, and others and you will be outranked rather quickly. 

My advice is NOT to wait around for these scenarios to happen, because they are rare and even if you do manage to see an opportunity, as long as you try playing the SEO game through this limited approach, you WILL lose and very quickly.

In these 3 rare scenarios, each has their own catch.

-The first requires that you have the friendship or connections with people who have successful sites of their own, but even that formula runs dry quickly.

-The second can go both ways, in that you may start ranking for a low or 0 value keyword (a business name), but the success rate still depends on marketing that business such that it gets attention on Google, so you will STILL need to work to get to that point.

-And finally, in the last example (instance) or finding a topic that’s popular without competition, you have a very small time frame to make this work AND you also need to understand that this scenario is itself VERY rare.

So basically everything points back to the tips I said earlier about ranking well. You just can’t be lazy anymore with this subject, you need to do it right.