Organic Food For Thought: Our Top All Things SEO Columns For 2015

Everything you need to know about SEO, delivered every Thursday.

It's tough being an SEO practitioner. Every time you think you've got the best practices down, some new development comes along that forces you to change your tactics or adjust your strategy. From algorithm updates to SERP layout adjustments to new search features, optimizing a website for organic search can often feel like trying to hit a moving target.

That's where our All Things SEO columnists come in. By sharing their insights and advice, columnists were able to help SEO newbies and veterans alike navigate the fast-changing organic search landscape throughout the year.

As with previous years, 2015 saw its fair share of major developments in the organic search world, each of which presented challenges as well as opportunities to search marketers.

In particular, we saw a huge shift in focus towards mobile this past year. On April 21, 2015, a day known within the tech world as "Mobilegeddon," Google released an algorithm update which gave a rankings boost to "mobile friendly" pages in Google's mobile search results. The mobile friendly update also gave greater visibility to app content within search results, which left search marketers eager to learn more about app indexing. Columns related to mobile search captured three of our top 10 spots this year.

Readers were also interested in "big picture" articles about Google. Two excellent thought pieces by Nate Dame, which focused largely on Google's evolving relationship with the SEO community, each garnered enough page views to break into the top five All Things SEO columns for 2015. Both are essential reading for those who want to gain a broader perspective on the state of the industry.

Top honors went to Adam Audette's piece, which explored how Google crawls and indexes JavaScript. Based on original research done by Merkle | RKG, this column offered concrete information on a topic which had previously been shrouded in mystery.

For these columns and more, check out our top 10 All Things SEO columns of 2015:

We Tested How Googlebot Crawls JavaScript And Here's What We Learned by Adam Audette, published on 5/8/15.Social Activity: Facebook 2498, Google+ 1357, LinkedIn 1092

5 Essential SEO Techniques To Master In 2015 by Jim Yu, published on 1/27/15.Social Activity: Facebook 921, Google+ 399, LinkedIn 614

10 WordPress SEO Questions That Took Me 10 Years To Answer! by Trond Lyngbø, published on 2/12/15.Social Activity: Facebook 1371, Google+ 526, LinkedIn 769

They Fooled Us All: Why Google May No Longer Announce Major Algorithm Updates by Nate Dame, published on 3/27/15.Social Activity: Facebook 585, Google+ 317, LinkedIn 621

How Google Won The PR Battle Over SEO, And Why That's A Good Thing by Nate Dame, published on 10/9/15.Social Activity: Facebook 779, Google+ 0, LinkedIn 473

App Indexing & The New Frontier of SEO: Apple Search + iOS App Indexing by Emily Grossman, published on 7/6/15.Social Activity: Facebook 552, Google+ 0, LinkedIn 503

YouTube Ranking Factors: Getting Ranked In The Second Largest Search Engine by Tony Edward, published on 7/24/15.Social Activity: Facebook 1276, Google+ 0, LinkedIn 717

Research Reveals What It Takes To Rank In Mobile Search Results by Jayson DeMers, published on 10/20/15.Social Activity: Facebook 1917, Google+ 206, LinkedIn 557

Mobilegeddon Is Beginning, Not Ending by Bryson Meunier, published on 5/7/15.Social Activity: Facebook 662, Google+ 0, LinkedIn 620

7 Key SEO Activities That Can Now Be Automated by Aleyda Solis, published on 6/25/15.Social Activity: Facebook 1225, Google+ 298, LinkedIn 644

Methodology: Columns published in 2015 are ranked in order of pageviews measured by Google Analytics. Data includes all columns published through November 30, 2015. Social data provided by SharedCount. 

About The Author Jessica Thompson is Associate Features Editor at Marketing Land and Search Engine Land. She is a well-rounded digital media enthusiast with a keen interest in all things Internet marketing. Jessica earned her B.A. in English from Drew University and has since gone on to fill a wide variety of roles over the course of her career, including web designer, copywriter, editor, SEO consultant, online marketing specialist and marketing manager. Most recently, she worked at Advance Digital, where she conducted digital optimization training for journalists and provided high-level SEO and social media recommendations for 12 major regional news websites, including NJ.com. (Some images used under license from Shutterstock.com.)
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