I Am Confused About Pages and Posts
Me, personally? No.
Content is king!
But should it be in the form of a page or post?
Oh, what to do?!
WordPress comes with two types of content, pages and posts.
Pages are:
- hierarchical
- static
- authoritative
Posts are:
- dynamic with frequent updates
- social and interactive
- included in RSS feeds
My websites are a combination of pages and posts. Some pages are static by nature; privacy policy, affiliate disclosure, and contact pages. Other pages are authoritative providing general information on specific topics.
My posts are timely reflecting current news and designed for sharing.
But deciding what new content should be is like trying to catch a point of light.
Should it be a page or a post? Does it matter?
But trying to find old posts is not easy. They are buried in the past. Categorization helps find them.
Thinking of the Readers
The user experience is an important consideration. Is the reader looking for information? Or is it transactional in nature? As in they want to buy.
Posts encourage social interaction through the comment function.
SEO Consideration
The search engines like organization. So pages being hierarchical are easily organized.
Yet, search engines like timeliness. As in "What's new, pussycat?" So posts reflect newness better than pages.
Clear as mud!
Recent Comments
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What I have done is post if it's quick information and not too long in content. If the info is more drawn out, then I have put it on a page. Good luck.
I think this topic has probably confused me more than anything else. I finally started studying other established websites and blogs to see what they were doing. For example, Universities tend to use pages but they don't change them or add to them on a daily basis.
Online stores and smaller popular websites and blogs seem to use posts that are put into categories (which have page sounding names.). A category could be "Keyword Research". If the reader clicks on the category, they can see all of the posts that deal with keyword research. The catagories can be added to the menus.
So, I'm using catagories for almost everything except privacy policy, about me page and Amazon affiliate disclosure.
Back in the day (yesterday), it was clearer. Posts were short (300 words) and very topical. Pages were long, content oriented, and impersonal. But now we have 2,000+ word long posts. Couple of my posts are 4,000 words. They probably should have been pages. :)
Ah...for those of us that are wordy, like myself, I'd never get to write a post if it had to be something short. Lol.
When a customer types in keywords that connect with an old post, do the search engines bring it forward on the search list for that customer? I thought they did, or why write posts at all?
Good question, Grant. An exact keyword match should bring the old post to the top. But there are other factors that determine the order of entries on a search engine results page. If there are other posts/pages that are exact keyword matches, they would/should rank based on age, newer being higher. But webpage and website authority and social popularity are important factors as well. The google ranking algorithm considers hundreds of factors in determining ranking.
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Clearly explained.
Thanks, Jimmy. I appreciate you stopping by.