Pages, posts, custom post types, portfolio pages, product categories, normal categories, tags, and media pages. Did we forget anything? The amount of accessible content available in WordPress is overwhelming. Usually our members only care about SEO and conversions, so this section will focus strictly on what to do.
Most commonly we’re asked, “should I use pages or posts?” The answer depends on a number of factors that we will dive into. There is no one-size-fits-all solution but if we were forced to choose, it would be pages.
What will rank?
You need a goal of what actually ranks. Is it the homepage which is seemingly harder to do? Is it a subpage dedicated to a keyword? What is your actual goal? Do you want a massive authority site that covers news and you just want to ride the newest trends?
Each of these questions can have a different outcome in which approach you should take. Let’s look at a few examples:
Homepage
Ranking a homepage may seem like a great idea because “it’s easy to get the most juice to the homepage” but keep in mind you may be shooting yourself in the foot. If you have a blog feed, you have a “variable” in your own SEO experiment. If you don’t keep an eye on the published date, your H tags, or other odd things like if you add a huge header that pushes content below the fold, you could be changing your SEO on a daily basis. Sometimes you’ll win, sometimes you will lose, and sometimes you will think “Google fluctuates way too much.”
If you want to rank a homepage for a competitive term, try to keep it static so you can control and document your changes. For homepages, we prefer to use one of the following:
1. Blog feed with our own Fresh PubDate plugin (it works really well!)
2. Page (recommended)
3. Widget-based Genesis theme (it works, but it’s messy)
Keep in mind that the slider fad is on its way out. Conversion people hate it. It takes too long to click through. It makes your page take longer to load. It just stinks. The new trend is parallax imagery with CSS animation. Try to stop using sliders as it will soon be a way of describing aged websites.
Subpage
For subpages, it’s almost best to look at the results already ranking for your target. Do they have the date included on Google? If there is a date, you should probably use “post” along with our Fresh PubDate plugin. It’s also easy to use the free version of the Author hReview plugin this way.
If the results don’t have dates, you may want to just use a page and keep your site a little more of a “controlled” experiment. View your source code to see if the published date is codified. If it is, use Fresh PubDate again. You almost can’t get away from Fresh PubDate. It’s that important.
Keep in mind if you use Raven’s schema review plugin, your published date will not be fresh to Google, even with the plugin. For this reason, we use author Hreview. It’s the easiest plugin we’ve found to do the job because it functions based on the same published date (not review date) as WordPress says, meaning our plugin works.
Categories
We have to talk about categories because at some point you will probably use posts to display your content, and posts require a category.
Usually we hate to target categories for ranking. We’ve seen plenty of evidence showing categories hurt sites ability to rank, but we’ve also seen categories themselves rank. It depends on the setup. We almost always recommend to noindex the categories.
If you really want to have a category rank, ask yourself if it’s just easier to create a page or post to target the same keyword. Your category should look and feel like a magazine or catalogue. If it doesn’t, you need to figure out how to make it feel that way. Often it’s just easier to create a landing page for that target, then work to make it convert and sell.
Blog Feed
Many sites have a blog section for no apparent reason. We run across it in many reviews of large ecommerce sites where a blog exists but does nothing for the site. We ask, “why does this even exist?” The webmaster usually says “SEO” or “I was told to add fresh content to help my ranking overall.”
The truth is the blog doesn’t help rankings at all. It usually hurts rankings because the content is complete junk. Often with these ecommerce sites, the subject is boring as “staplers” and there simply isn’t newsworthy content to write about on a regular basis.
It’s almost better to use it as a news source. Think RCS. It should almost be your own press release center of all the newsworthy things you accomplish.
Media, Tags, Portfolio, Custom Taxonomies, etc.
We use Yoast to redirect media pages like images to the root. For some reason by default, WordPress wants you to link to every image and have that open in the same window. It’s stupid. Once you set it to not link to the image once, it’s fixed. But there is a plugin to help out with that.
Tags should never be used. If you actually use it for browsing, like Subtle Patterns does, then maybe it’s okay. It’s still a risk that should be avoided. Yoast covered tags quite well on his site. We believe it’s best to just delete them in mass 99% of the time.
Portfolios usually have no purpose for ranking. If you want to make a landing page, do it with a page. Most portfolios have strange coding that doesn’t actually start the entry-content DIV layer (the important one) until way too far down the page, and even then it ends up empty so Google thinks you have thin content. Just build a real page or noindex it altogether.
Custom taxonomies/post types can be cool and function exactly like pages. You have to inspect how it’s coded to be 100% sure you aren’t committing SEO suicide.
WooCommerce and other e-commerce plugins use their own post types. WooCommerce is really well built for SEO. However we have found it’s much easier to rank the actual landing pages over the product page every single time. If your product pages aren’t ranking, just build a SEO lander for it.