There are roughly two ways you can create and publish content, no matter the type of website or blog you manage. If you want to make your site a little more user-friendly, you need to choose between adding pages or posts. But how can you know which one is the right option for you?
We’ll discuss the differences between the two in this article, and we’ll also look at WordPress pages vs posts vs categories, for a change.
Posts make up the majority of a blog’s content, especially if you use WordPress. This is a form of content that’s generally displayed in a reverse chronological order. Adding it is very easy and keeping it well-organized is just as easy — since you can add categories and tags to each post.
Posts are syndicated through RSS feeds, which means that bloggers can use a variety of email marketing services from MailChimp to Aweber to create newsletters for their subscribers. Pages aren’t usually included in RSS feeds, by contrast.
Depending on the theme and options you have picked on your blog or site, posts can come with a built-in comment box and sharing features, which allow your readers to distribute your content on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and others.
Comments can be turned on or off on each post and so can social sharing, depending on the plugins you have available at your disposal for the purpose.
Pages are static content, meaning that they aren’t specifically made to be altered time and again, and they also don’t depend on any chronological content modifications. In essence, pages are timeless, so you can’t expect one you have created in 2015 to expire in 2020.
You can alter a page’s content. For example, if you sell your business, the About Us and Contact pages can be modified by the future owner. If you have the same blog for five years, it’s quite likely that you aren’t going to make a lot of changes to the Contact page during this time span.
Pages can’t be included in RSS feeds because they aren’t tied to a date or time. You can, of course, add a link to them manually in your newsletter if you use a platform such as MailChimp, for example.
Pages aren’t specifically made to be shared, so that’s why they don’t come with any sharing buttons. The same goes for comments. You will have to manually allow comment boxes on your pages if you want to interact with your readers even there.
The first difference between a page and a post is that the former is usually static. It’s published once and the content can be updated, but it’s not chronologically listed like a post.
Pages don’t depend on the publication date. If you have a Disclaimer page, an About Us page, or a Contact page, the publication date doesn’t affect them in any way. By contrast, the latest posts are almost always displayed on the homepage, especially if you have a blog and that’s what you choose.
Another aspect that makes the difference between posts and pages is that the second are part of the menu, so they are commonly used for navigation. In terms of taxonomy, pages don’t have tags and categories whereas posts do.
While pages don’t have a public author, posts do. That means that your website visitors can’t click on one page’s author’s name and check out all of the pages or posts that they have created.
Last, but not least, pages can have a hierarchy in their URL, which is not something that can be said for posts. And most pages aren’t included in RSS feeds – only posts are.
If you’re just starting out, it can be challenging to make the difference between pages and posts, but we’ll try to shed some light on how you can organize your content as best as possible.
As we have noted, timeless content needs to be on pages, not in posts.
In terms of SEO, and if you’re building an affiliate site, especially, pages can also be used for internal linking purposes. For example, if you have a golf site, here are some of the post categories that you might have:
Your posts are grouped into categories, but the internal linking you have on your site should be done according to the silo, as well. That means that if you have a post about the ‘best golf shoes for women’, it shouldn’t be linking to the ‘best Callaway golf clubs’ – as they are in two different categories.
Okay, but where do pages come in? Well, there are roughly three ways of making sure that your site gets crawled properly. You can choose to rely on categories and a sound internal linking plan.
You can use a menu-customizing plugin to add the most important posts you have on your site to your navigation, in which case they’ll be on the homepage and they’ll be crawled before the less important ones.
There’s also the option of you creating a page for each category. In this case, you’d have the same 4 categories we’ve mentioned (we’re still using the golf site example), but you’ll also have 4 pages with the same name. Why? Well, for each new important post that you’ll put together, you’ll add a link to it from its corresponding page. In this situation, the links will be at depth 1 (the homepage being depth 0), and the posts themselves will be at depth 2.
Here is an example of a plan that works well, especially with affiliate sites.
Homepage – Page – Main post (best golf shoes) – Individual review post
Usually, ‘review keywords’ have a lower search volume, so you can place them at a lower depth. But they have to be somehow crawlable, otherwise they aren’t going to rank for any keywords and they aren’t going to get any traffic. Pages can help you do just that.
If you have a business site, it’s quite likely that you aren’t going to be using posts at all, especially if you don’t want to create a blog, too. However, we would recommend against that if you want to build a fan base or just showcase your work.
Naturally, case studies can be displayed on pages just as well, but you will have to find a way to place them, too, even at a lower depth so that they are crawled and indexed. You can always make a blog section for announcements, news, or case studies, and tell people how you can help them with your services.
So where do categories come in in all of this? Categories are totally independent from pages and posts, meaning that they are not the same entity. They aren’t pages or posts, but they are a great way of organizing your posts. Pages can’t be organized depending on categories.
For internal linking purposes, you should avoid inter-linking between posts under different categories. You can do that, if you absolutely have to, but doing so within the same category is a way of keeping your internal linking structure clean and tidy.
If you don’t choose a category each time you publish a post, it will automatically go under ‘Uncategorized’. Picking the category is something that should become almost automatic to you – after you copy and paste the content into the CMS, choosing the category is one of the first things that you should do.
There isn’t a clear answer to this question, and that’s because from an SEO perspective, search engines like to find a structure that’s as well organized as possible. We already talked about how you can organize your silos using internal links and pages, so you can use that strategy.
In general, however, besides the most important pages that you should have on your blog or site (About Us, Contact, Disclaimer and the rest), you can use posts to create well-organized silos, too. So, it is not a matter of which one is better or worse, it’s only a matter of the type of site structure that you will choose.
All websites should have most of the pages listed below.
A 404 page should be created, as well, for times when a post or a page doesn’t exist anymore. However, you should audit your site for 404s regularly so you keep them to the lowest possible number.
You can also have a Write for Us page, one for advertising, and one for Archives.
There is no limit as to how many posts or pages you can put together, but do keep in mind that they should all have their place. Pages are usually included in your homepage, so their number is typically limited. We’d say that up to 10 or 20 pages is the acceptable number.
As for posts, since the content in them is timely, there is no reason why you couldn’t create as many as you’d like.