A website is the foundation of any good SEO strategy, but it can be overlooked as one of the key ranking factors when looking at ranking for commercial keywords. We all know that link building and good quality content are essential aspects for getting good SEO rankings, however if your website is not kept up to date with the best practises, then all those good quality links and excellent content will lose their 'bang'.As technology develops and Google's services also begin to evolve, it becomes increasingly important that your website is kept up to date from a technical point of view as well in 2015. Technical SEO includes things that you might not have known impact your SEO rankings. This can include things like download times, mobile friendly design, URL structure, URL length, XML Sitemap is uploaded and 301 redirects are in place correctly to name just a few.During a process of reviewing your on-page 'technical SEO' aspects, this would also be the ideal time to look at other more traditional SEO aspects and ensure you are up to date in 2015. These kind of attributes would be things such as correctly formatted title tags, good quality content distributed throughout the website, ensure no duplicate content, ensure no duplicate title tags, ensure no duplicate meta descriptions, good site structure in place, good internal linking, website news section in place, formatted H1 tags and alt text for images.SEO Audit ChecklistWhen we get a new website project for SEO we will always look at doing an SEO Audit. This can show us any issues that would hinder our link building and off page SEO efforts right from the start. As there are so many on-page SEO factors, we like to work off a good checklist, which we are going to share below:On-Page SEO- Title tags optimised with brand name- Meta descriptions optimised- H1 tags utilising keyword if appropriate- Main images on website have relevant alt text applied- URLs are static, keyword appropriate and relevant- URLs adhere to less than 200 charactersOn-Page Content- Home page has relevant keyword rich content- Key service / landing pages have relevant keyword rich content- Website as a whole has quality content on majority of pages / sub pages- Website has a blog / news section- Blog and news section has content added to it and is relevant- Keywords are used throughout website when appropriate and relevant- Call to actions are present- Social media icons present in the header- Duplicate content does not exist on the website- Correct H tags are used- Web page content is correctly broken down into correct grammar and paragraphsOn-Page Navigation- At least one good navigation bar is in place (we recommend two)- Robots.txt is not active or being misused to sculpt PageRank- All website content is accessible to both users and search engine bots- No cloaking is present- Any 404 errors are redirected to relevant pages- Hierarchical category structure in place i.e. Home Page, Category Pages, Sub Category Pages, Product Pages- Content based links to appropriate pages used- All internal links workingOn-Page Technical- 301 redirects set-up to relevant pages- Improper redirects avoided i.e. 302 redirects- Redirects occur one time to correct page, multiple redirects lose link value- iframe use checked in multiple browser- Is Flash being used and if so is it impacting crawling?- Google Webmaster Tool check for site speed issues- XML sitemap set-up and integrated to Google Webmaster Tools- Rel Canonical tag used correctly- Caching and compression is enabled- Good quality hosting usedOn-Page Mobile- Is there a mobile solution in place?- Is it responsive, mobile site or dynamic?- Analytics tracking correctly on mobile platform- Mobile site structure in place and fully testedAs you can see there is a lot to keep an eye on when it comes to ensuring your on-page SEO is in order and that is why it is important to be regularly auditing, improving and developing your website. By doing this you ensure that any off page SEO you might do such as link building is having the maximum positive effect on your website.If you have any questions or would like Bang Online to have a look at your website from an SEO Audit perspective, then get in touch!