We need to make the world seem real, and building up this picture in the reader's mind is best done in a straightforward way. Have confidence in your story, and remember that the reader is willing to suspend belief while they read your tale. The reader is willing to believe anything we tell them, so long as that story world isn't just plain stupid or inconsistent.
How do we give the stamp of realness to our world? By knowing about it in glorious colour. We need to know its geography, its culture, its history, its languages. The more we've worked out these, the more convincing our descriptions of the everyday of that world will be. We need a sense of the history of the world, both geologically and culturally. The reader might have been plonked down in the middle of the action, but that action, and that world, have been in existence for a long time before we came to them. Or at least, the writer needs to give the impression that they have.
Keeping language simple is one way to get your world accepted. Keep names simple and consistent. Anything that looks unpronounceable should go. In some of my early novels I fell into the common trap of creating aliens with names containing lots of apostrophes. Thankfully, I've abandoned that now. In my young adult novel Geneship, the alien leader is called Yull. Short and simple. The same goes for dialogue. Yes, there'll be a few new slang words in your world, but a house is still a house, a city a city, a boat a boat. There's no reason to call them anything else.
And see the world through the eyes of your viewpoint character. If there's a storm brewing, get her to feel the freshening breeze and the drop in temperature, see the people around her scurrying about bringing livestock into barns for safety, putting up the shutters at the house windows.
The more you can get the reader to sense the wind on her face, the more real your story world will feel to them.
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