The difference between posts and pages

A client asked me the other day, what’s the difference between posts and pages on my WordPress website. I thought I’d write out my response to her, since odds are a few others have same question. So …

What’s the difference between posts and pages?

They’re kind of like apples to oranges. Your posts are content entries that are listed in reverse chronological order on your blog. Due to this, your posts are meant to be timely. Your pages are meant to be static content such as your about page.
Essentially posts are more dynamic and pages are more static. Your website needs both. The search engines receive a ping when a post is added but not a page. a search engine will crawl all pages and posts on a site unless you’ve asked them not to (you can control this on each page as needed). Although, even if you ask SERPS not to craw a page or a post, it’s a request only and they don’t always honor that, meaning sometimes they’ll crawl and index anyways.

Once you’ve got a handle on the difference between posts and pages, it’s time to think about SEO.

For any page or post to achieve SEO, or search engine optimization, rank, it needs a few fundamental things. It needs to:

• Be well built (content, style, meta data and amount of words)
• Be well optimized – and –
• Receive good traffic

If your pages or posts aren’t linked anywhere, odds are they aren’t getting much traffic and hence won’t perform well, e.g. you shouldn’t create many pages like this unless you’re going to drive ample traffic to them via social media, email marketing, and through your campaigns. You also want to make sure they’re included in your sitemap (exist in your main navigation and your site’s sitemap.xml).
Have fun out there and as always, ask us if you get stuck.
Best, Christina | Creative @ Savy Agency