Required Reading For Enterprise SEOs: The Top 25 Posts Of The Year

The Enterprise SEO column made its debut on Search Engine Land midway through 2011, as large companies and big brands were faced with new challenges and massive opportunities in the search world.

In 2012, we saw mega-sized content sites lose visibility in search results due to Panda, while the Penguin updates squashed those who gambled their brand credibility with poor link building strategies, both leading to wildly changing SERPs that were only impacted further by Google+ and new features such as authorship markup.

Meanwhile, the attention focused social media threatened to take away budget, resources and credit for search success that enterprise SEO’s have long fought to earn.

Working through layers of management bureaucracy and departmental ownership issues has always been one of the biggest challenges for enterprise SEO’s, but with the increasing relevance of social signals, large organizations now have a significant opportunity to merge the best practices of technical SEO with foundational social media strategies to maximize their visibility in organic search results.

If these topics sound familiar to you and your organization, know you’re not alone, as the top articles below were some of our most read posts of the year in the Enterprise SEO column.

If you missed any of these posts the first time around, take a few minutes in the new year to catch up some of the best advice of the year, which might help you plan out your 2013 search strategies. Also, make sure you don’t miss a single installment of Enterprise SEO in 2013 – sign up for the weekly newsletter or follow @sengineland’s Enterprise SEO columnist list on Twitter to catch new articles as they publish.

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Top 25 Enterprise SEO Articles Of 2012

1. The Definitive Guide To Authorship Markup  – Rick DeJarnette
2. The Ultimate Guide To Enterprise SEO: 25 Things To Know Before You Take The Plunge – Brian Provost
3. The Latest & Greatest On SEO Pagination – Adam Audette
4. 24 Ways To Make Life Hard For Your SEO Team – Eric Enge
5. Why So Many Companies Fail At Enterprise SEO – Marshall Simmonds
6. Don’t Fall Into The Made-For-SEO Website Trap – Eric Enge
7. How Google Autocomplete Can Affect Your Brand’s SEO & ORM Strategy – Brian Patterson
8. The Forgotten SEO Strategy: Targeting Striking Distance Keywords – Nathan Safran
9. Large-Scale Content Optimization Tactics For Enterprise Sites – Adam Sherk
10. 7 Tricks To Take The Scary Out Of SEO – Tom Schmitz
11. Easy SEO Wins For Big Sites – Ian Lurie
12. 5 Ways To Better Integrate Social Media & Enterprise SEO – Adam Sherk
13. What Is In Your Enterprise SEO Toolkit? – Ian Lurie
14. The Challenge Of Justifying Enterprise SEO – Ian Lurie
15. A Year-End Checklist For Evaluating Your Enterprise SEO Program – Adam Sherk
16. 10 Reasons Enterprise SEO Is Trouble, Plus 4 Ways To Make It Work – Ian Lurie
17. You Don’t Have To Be Nuts To Worry About Changing Your Domain – Jonah Stein
18. Examining Real World Uses Of Rich Snippets & Markup – Barbara Starr
19. How To Build An Authority Strategy For Your Company – Eric Enge
20. How To Structure Your Organization For SEO Success – Eric Enge
21. You Know You’re An Enterprise SEO If… – Ian Lurie
22. Why Enterprise SEO Shouldn’t Focus Solely On Keywords – Ian Lurie
23. The Keys To Success In Enterprise SEO – Rick DeJarnette
24. 10 Numbers Every Enterprise SEO Needs On Speed Dial – Brian Provost
25. The Enterprise SEO Guide To Response Codes – Ian Lurie

All of the columnists above have put an exceptional amount of effort into their articles this year, and we’re beyond thankful for their contributions and the readers who have shared these pieces far and wide.

What issues, strategies or tactics are at the top of your list for 2013 as an enterprise level SEO? I’m sure the authors will be glad to share some of their top tips in the coming year.