What are the main reasons behind of good ranking of a website on which very less or no work has been done..
Basically lots of SEO from sources such as press release, article sites and guest blogging. However, you'd definitely need to increase the quality of your content if you really want your SEO to pay out.
In my opinion it really depends on keyword competition. You can use sites like Google's Keyword Tool to see what you're up against. If you have low competition, it will be really easy to rank. PM me if you need help with the Keyword Tool. Hope I helped!
I think it's a matter of content, keyword choices, and a lot of luck. There is no specific formula for why something becomes super popular or goes viral.
There are a number of reasons that a website could get ranked without "a lot of work," mainly: one decent high PR link from somewhere like "mashable.com" or "WSJ.com" could cause a site to rank for a number of keywords overnight. a huge surge in traffic/views from actions such as hitting the front page of reddit.com or digg.com could be a source of link bait, which will surely boost a site in the organic rankings. It is difficult to define what "a lot of work" is, so forgive me if my answers were terse.
Quality backlinks from highly authoritative and relevant sites are the main reasons why those sites rank higher in the search results. Quality content they have is the main reason why those sites rank.
The question here was the main reasons behind a good ranking of a website on which very less or no work has been done. He is not asking when a heavy work is performed, as many replies are saying here. Negispark, in my opinion, there is only one reason; LUCK. Everyday I’m more convinced about that. Good luck!
There are so much possibilities. However, it is not wise to call "very less or no work at all" until we know exactly webmaster who own it. Sometimes you'll see a domain without traffic and backlink get in first position for some keywords and beat the other established sites. No, it is not because of Google honeymoon or some kind of black hat techniques. Sometimes SE see an IP receives lots of positive feedback. When authority and trust for an IP become greater, any sites using the IP were affected positively even without backlink. Most expert call it "invisible backlink". Authority and trust from the author affect the domain too.
I would say content and innovation. Remember Twitter or Pinterest, or any other website which introduced a brand new "service" (I'd say type of interaction), and they gained enormous popularity. So it should be unique, stand out and get a lot of organic traffic!