In order to be featured in search engine results, you must engage in a variety of search engine optimization actions. This usually pertains to the overall structure of your website, but can also be related to each individual page or piece of content, as well as your social media outreach. With dozens of different tactics employed across content, social media, search engines and via paid marketing, it can be hard to sort through everything you need to do for your brand. When focusing on SEO, there are also quite a number of possibilities, but most need simply focus on the basics in order to guarantee a chance for success. Below, we’ll discuss six elements that are at the crux of your site’s SEO credibility and how search engines will view it.

Site Speed

When pinging networks with content or data, search engines will look for a lot of things – site speed is one of them. Load time can determine in large part how well you rank in search results, and this is often determined by page size, hosting plans and other factors. With many different ways to measure site speed, it can be difficult to sort through it all, but general loading time (for your page to appear) is where you should focus.

Backlinks

Simply put, backlinks are links to your site from other sites. This can be a great way to build clout, but some backlinks can also hurt you. Without a strong portfolio of backlinks, though, your website will lack critical credibility in the eyes of search engines – many of which weigh sites’ credibility based on the number of other sites linking to them.

Number of Pages

Believe it or not, the total number of pages you have plays a huge role in how much of your content will be seen by those who perform searches. While great content will find a way to the right eyes in some form, those sites with mediocre content – but a huge number of pages – often float to the top of search results (think eHow). It should go without saying, but your pages must both exist AND be indexed by search engines for this to apply.

Organic Traffic

How many visitors are pinging networks such as search and arriving at your site (without you paying for the traffic)? This is referred to as organic traffic, and is a key measurement of your SEO credibility. This is the ultimate goal for search engine optimization and marketing: to boost organic traffic to its maximum. Google Analytics is a great way to keep track of these basic figures and metrics.

Domain Authority

Last but not least, domain authority carries a huge amount of weight in the world of search engine optimization. This was developed by Moz as a way to measure likely performance of a website – and it’s a pretty good metric. Your domain is ranked on a scale of 0-100, and makes this assessment off of many of the items we mentioned above, plus dozens of other metrics.