What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.
Domain Authority
Domain Authority is Moz’s calculated metric for how well a given domain is likely to rank in Google’s search results. It is based off data from the Mozscape web index and includes link counts, MozRank, and MozTrust scores, and dozens of other factors. It uses a machine learning model to predictively find an algorithm that best correlates with rankings across thousands of search results that we predict against.
The Domain Authority metric has proved to be one of the most reliable numbers for determining the success of a website in the SERPs. A higher DA invariably translates into bigger traffic and better search ranking.
Site Speed (Loading Time)
A website’s speed is basically how fast it appears in a user’s browser.
Technically, site speed is dependent upon load time. Load time calculates the latency from the point at which a user submits a request. The network server time and browser time are both factored into the equation, along with the page size (measured in bytes), and requests.
Though there are a variety of technical factors to load time, the most important issue to take notice of is the number of seconds/milliseconds it takes for your page to appear.
Site speed is crucial for two related reasons —
1) SEO
2) user experience. From an SEO standpoint, it’s apparent that Google devalues sites with long load times. This may be tied to the user experience issue. Pages that take a long time to load have higher bounce rates and lower levels of engagement.
You know this experientially. If a page takes a long time to load, you probably become impatient. You may click off to a new tab to pass the time while the slow-loading page comes into view. Or, you may just forget about it altogether.
Backlinks
A backlink is any link to your site from an external site. There are entire companies devoted to analyzing this set of data alone. There are an infinite number of ways you can slice, dice, analyze, parse, interpret, and view this data, but the simple metric that I want to point out is the number of backlinks.
It’s an undisputed fact in the SEO world that backlinks are the most crucial component of a website’s health and wellbeing. Without strong backlinks, you have no search engine optimization, no authority, no traffic, and very little in the way of digital marketing success.
It is still extremely important that your site have a variety of strong backlinks to show the search engines that your site is valuable, useful, and worthy of high rankings.
Backlinks, or more comprehensively, a site’s link profile as a whole, is the most important factor Google considers when it analyzes a site for ranking.
It’s dangerous to rely on the number of backlinks alone as a determinative metric for taking action. A site could have billions of backlinks, but a huge percentage of these may be spammy, thus compromising the link profile. Another website may have just a small handful of backlinks, but they are all high-authority, reputable, niche sites that lend value. Although this is one of the most important numbers to consider for SEO, it should be considered in conjunction with other factors.
Organic Visits
Organic visits are the number of visitors referred by an unpaid search engine. “Organic” is usually contrasted with “paid,” which is traffic that comes from Adwords or other advertisements. Organic visits matter a lot, because this is the number of users who are finding your site by typing queries into Google or other search engines. This is the goal of search marketing — creating a website and web content that people will find organically. The more organic visitors, the better you’re doing with your content and content marketing.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate is defined as “the percentage of visitors to a particular website who navigate away from the site after viewing only one page.” A site with a high bounce rate is a site that is performing poorly in the experience of users, and therefore in the judgment of the search engines. If people visit a single page on your site and do not go deeper, they are considered to have bounced.