At Distilled, we've recently acquired clients that would be categorized as large enterprises. Some of the challenges of working with large enterprises revolve around the complexity of how the company is internally organized. For instance, many large enterprise are comprised of several different departments that may or may not have existing relationships. In such circumstances, our roles as SEOs become more complicated as our task as SEOs oftentimes becomes that of a project manager, while we simultaneously develop strategies on how to implement strong internal processes that are ideally somewhat automated.

One of our clients is in an industry where new content is continuously being generated. Multiple entities contribute to the site's new content and because these contributors manage many responsibilities, implementing SEO best practices are rarely a priority. The development team wanted us to come up with CMS recommendations that will help to automate and consequently, improve the SEO on their sites. Below are 5 of the recommendations we suggested that could benefit anyone who is working or will work with a large enterprise client.

1) SEO Score Sheet

A method of effectively optimizing the site for SEO is to create an SEO score sheet. Any new content in the CMS must meet a minimum requirement for SEO optimization before it can go live. This score could then be translated into a grade. For example, following only the minimum requirements of the score sheet would result in a C grade.

Below is a sample of what the specs of the SEO checklist might include. Obviously these requirements are based on the individual realities of each company and thus, would need to be modified as such. In this example, the content must meet all the criteria listed under the "Required" section and any 3 items listed under the "Recommended" section before the content can be published. You can use this full technical site audit checklist to get ideas about what your SEO score sheet should include.

Required

• Include a meta description that is less than 155 characters
• Content must contain a minimum of 80 words of unique content
• Content must contain a unique headline
• Images must contain an alt tag

Recommended

• All images have captions
• Content contains at least 1 image
• Headlines must contain one suggested keyword
• Content contains at least 1 link with optimized anchor text
• Image file names contain at least 1 descriptive keyword
• Content contains at least 2 keywords
• Event name is the first word of the headline for news event articles
• News article images are at least 300px in one dimension
• For slideshows, include unique content about each image that is crawlable
• For videos, include full transcripts on the page
• For videos, the word "video" is included in both the title and the description

Our client responded positively with this suggestion and even came up with their own ideas. For instance, they declared that this would work perfectly as an internal departmental competition to see which departments received the highest SEO grades each quarter. In addition, the client even suggested that this score sheet could work well as an internal SEO report card.

Overall, this type of system could also become a useful internal analytical tool to see which departments have trouble meeting the requirement and thus might benefit from additional internal SEO training.

2) Alerts

Alerts can be bothersome, but a well-engineered alert is also really appreciated. For instance, I really like this Gmail alert which asks if you had forgotten to attach the files. This has saved me from resending countless emails.

Alerts can either be used alongside or independently from the SEO score sheet. These could be used to make sure that any article contains a minimum of 80 words before it can be published or in other scenarios, such as when articles contain the same title as another live article. This would require content writers to edit their title to something more unique, which would eliminate duplicate title issues.

For sites that have issues with having tons of different tags (some of which are heavily utilized, while others are rarely used) like blogs, consider implementing an "Are you sure?" alert that would allow individuals to reconsider whether the tag should be created.  For a more detailed and actionable tag, consider implementing a "Did you mean _____ tag?" that would include suggestions from existing utilized tags based on the tag that was about to be added. For example, if a "content management system" tag was about to be added, a "Did you mean CMS?" alert would appear. This would help to eliminate variations of similar types of tags from the CMS.

3) Help Center

To help content writers understand and implement different SEO practices, incorporate more information about SEO in the CMS. Some CMS systems already provide additional information for other sections via the question mark, such as on how to set time/date like in the example below. Consider adding this feature for other sections that are particularly important for SEO, such as title and description fields. These sections should provide very brief, but explicit instructions (such as specific word counts) on how they should be utilized.

4) Adding Canonical and 301 Redirect Fields

Adding rel canonical for cross-domain canonicalization and 301 redirect fields on every page within the CMS would allow sites to better manage their content and actively optimize for SEO. Although this field might not be used regularly, its purpose is to act as an insurance mechanism in case of any major future changes or implementations, such as a site redesign. This field should have limited access to those who would know how to properly use it.

The SEOmoz blog actually incorporates this feature as shown in the screenshot below.

5) Incorporating Keyword Research

To improve and encourage the use of targeted keywords, create a tool that would provide keyword suggestions based on the content. Ideally, this type of implementation would be used primarily for landing or category pages, where the targeted keyword list has already been compiled and approved. For example, if the content was written about "selling cars", the keyword tool might suggest including terms, such as "cars for sale."

I would love to hear about how other SEOs in the community handle content management for large enterprises in the comments section below. What has been effective or what problems are you struggling with?