There are 2 ways to post content on WordPress websites: One is through pages. The other is through posts. But does one way rank better than the other for SEO?
This is what I’d like to give you my position on since it was a question I had asked frequently when I was new to SEO and after many years of seeing one particular strategy work over and over, here are the general guidelines I have:
1) Pages and posts are the same the thing when it comes to WordPress.
2) It is generally better to create posts if you’re running a new website and have your main URL display a blog roll (which shows posts). This helps Google spiders crawl your content a little bit faster and if you create content frequently this way, it helps your site grow it’s authority faster and exit the sandbox faster as a result.
3) However, pages should not be discounted and I mainly create them when I write things like my about me article, a get started article, an about us article, things like that.
4) If you are currently in a position where you created a lot of pages and are worried you’ll lose ranking for it, don’t, because in the end, Google still sees these them as the same thing and there is no ranking factor that I know of that discriminates between them.
In the end, if you write an article and it’s classified as a page or post, it will eventually rank under the same rules and in the same way if it’s content is good. The classification of the content you write doesn’t really matter.
So for people who understand the details of what I just wrote and are more experienced SEO users, you should be fine from this point. But if you are more of a beginner, I’ll be explaining in better detail these same points I just made.
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Either way, you can ask me detailed questions about this below.
Now for the details of why I have these positions and on this topic…
1) Again, posts and pages are basically the same thing.
You can literally log into your WordPress website right now, click to create a new article under either of these classifications and guess what?
You’ll see the EXACT same layout, with the main things shown for either option, that being a box for the title, a large section for the body and if you have plugins installed like the All in One SEO tool or these other SEO tools I personally use, they will be shown exactly the same way on posts and pages.
But why is that these 2 things even exist?
Well my understanding is that posts are more often associated as “blogs” whereas the other is more often associated as important parts of the site. But this doesn’t mean you should worry about where to classify content you’re about to write.
You can honestly make every single article on your site either one of those things or a random mix if you want. I’ve just learned to navigate it in the way I explained in point 2 from people I know to be experts at this and followed their strategy and because this approach has gotten me results, I haven’t really deviated from it since I learned and began implementing it.
Here is that approach explained again:
2) When you have a new website, make a blog roll your home and a majority of your articles posts.
What happens with this approach is that your site will start to show your most recent blogs (posts) and when Google visits it, and sees new fresh content being displayed there, it crawls your site more often and this helps SEO speed up a little bit.
I don’t really know why this same feature is not available for pages, but I just apply it as it’s taught.
Now later on when your WordPress site grows to an authority site, it is recommended to switch up the blog roll to a main page that helps introduce people to the site and to put up the blog as a menu item people can access rather.
Don’t worry though. Whether or not you do this early on or when your site becomes an authority, doesn’t really change the big picture SEO game where the most important thing that determines how well the site does is it’s content quality and how often it’s created.
So as long as this is what the focus of the site is, you’ll be fine.
3) Like I said, I only really make pages when I’m not interested in targeting a keyword term.
You don’t really have to follow this rule, but I do because posts can get seen faster by Google and ranked faster if they are on a blog roll and that is on the homepage, I generally use that to my advantage and when it comes to pages, I only really use them to create general content as I said before (the about me article, the contact us article, and so on).
4) If you aren’t already following the approach I suggested in #2, don’t let it bother you.
While there are plugins available which transform pages into posts and vice versa, if you are currently running a WordPress site which has let’s say 100 articles and most of them are pages, do NOT worry about changing them into posts.
If they aren’t ranking well on Google, it is not because their classification is “wrong”, it’s because they aren’t optimized enough in their content to rank high, which is why if you are in that situation right now, do these things to improve it and yes, these tips will work for either classification (because again, it’s the same thing).
So overall, I’d say if you came to this article worried that one type of article ranks better than the other, the overall answer is it doesn’t and you shouldn’t really change anything in regards to how it’s classified.
Just stick to the optimization tips I suggested and let that help the article rank better.