Hello and welcome to SEO . It's Not that Hard . I'm your host , ed Dawson , the founder of KeywordsPeopleUsecom . These solutions are the questions people ask online . In today's episode , I'm going to talk about why pages rather than posts work better for building topical authority when using WordPress .
Last week I listed the podcast and also a customer of Keywords People Use contacted me and they were just struggling with how to set their blog up , their website up , for topical authority . They'd written a lot of really great content and it was all in press posts and it was on a blog role .
Now the thing with posts on WordPress is they are shown in reverse chronological order . On a blog page , the newest content , ie the latest posts , are shown at the top of the list . This chronological display means there's no real relation between the posts by default . It also means it's hard for people to discover related content on your website .
This also translates down to when Google looks at your website . It's not going to see the relationship between posts on similar topics . While the content was great , the relationship between the content wasn't there and also it was hard for users and for Google to see the posts in context of each other .
The content that was written was really good , evergreen topical content . The site architecture was all wrong . Before we get into the next section , if you haven't listened to a few episodes , back at episode 37 , which came out on December 4th site architecture for topical authority it's worth going and listening to that .
If you're not familiar with the concept of pillars and cluster pages , if you're off menu with all that stuff , then great . If we're going to set up a WordPress site for topical authority , we want to put our content that is , our evergreen topical authority content into pages .
The reason we want to use pages rather than posts is that pages have a parent-child relationship . You can set up a pillar page at the top level and then you can have child pages off that pillar page . Conversely , you can also have each of those child pages can have their own child pages and you can carry that parent-child relationship all the way down .
It helps you create a really rich architecture for topical authority , relating posts and their cluster pages to each other and linking them to each other with breadcrumbs . This allows you to make an architecture where your content is timeless and evergreen , where people can easily browse through a navigation structure to find related content to each other .
The same thing with Google . Google can also relate different parts of the site and different cluster pages and pillar pages to each other to build up that authority between themselves . That's not to say that I don't recommend using posts at all , but if you're doing posts , they should be really bloggy-type content , content which is maybe time-limited .
It could be if you've got a sale on , if you're an e-commerce site , or it could be if you're a review site or reviewing something that's going to be short-lived , something that doesn't necessarily relate to anything else . We've got content that's designed to rank for the long term , that evergreen content , which most of your content really should be .
Then you'll want to put it on pages and sub-pages and child pages so you can build that pillar , cluster page type architecture that will build topical authority . Now , if you're starting a new site from scratch , that's great , easy .
You can just start off with using posts , setting your hierarchy up , and there's no real other SEO implications to think of in the first instance , because you're starting on a fresh new site .
If you've got an existing site , there's a few things that if you're going to look at moving from some of your content out of posts and into pages , that you'll want to think about . Now the actual process itself can be quite easy . There's a few . If you just Google for WordPress , move posts to pages and vice versa , there are lots of really good plugins .
I'll actually do this for you and let you switch content types so you don't have to start again like the guy was helping out . He got over 100 posts that he created and his first that was I'm never going to be able to recreate 100 posts , it'll take me ages . It was actually .
I showed him a plugin that could do it and he just started Bruce , like brilliant , I can just do this . He was starting to shift him over straight away .
Now , when you do move them over , you obviously also need to use a 301 redirect to tell Google and search engines that the content has moved from one URL pattern to a new URL pattern , because the URL pattern will change when you go from a post to a page , because with pages don't have timestamps in the URL by default , whereas posts do .
So you need to make sure that if you're moving content around that's already been indexed , that you use a 301 redirect . Again , there are lots of plugins out there that can help you handle 301 redirects on WordPress . Just Google is your friend here . Just Google WordPress through a one domain plugin and it will .
Yeah , there's plenty of options there to help you sort that out . Again , if you are nervous about moving from posts to pages , you don't have to do it all in one go . It's the kind of thing that you can do bit by bit , sort of drip feed drip free existing posts into pages .
Do it bit by bit , but bit by bit , just to make sure that you don't if you're worried about any effects that might have on Google in the short term . You know , just moved a few pages at a time and doing it every spacing out of time can be an absolutely perfect way of doing it .
But yeah , just to reiterate , if you are going to move posts to pages , make sure you use a 301 redirect . If you don't want 301 redirect is then episode 39 , which I published on the 8th of December on this podcast , talks to what 301 redirects , on why you need to use them .
So it's just making sure that you telling Google I've moved this page of this post and it's this is its new URL . So yeah , just that's the key , that's any key thing to be sure you do . If you've got questions about how to do this , especially about how to do it on your own site . Do feel free to get in touch .
Like I said , the guy helped this last week . He just dropped me an email and said he was struggling and I just said share me the URL . And then I did a few little short five minute videos where I just stepped through his site and sort of made suggestions and the things I would have done differently , and we just did a few little back and forth like that .
And , yeah , I think it's going to be really valuable for him and I'd be happy to help other people . So do just get in touch . You can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom , or you can get hold of me on Twitter . I'm at channel five . Thanks for listening . I really appreciate it . Subscribe and share it really helps .
Seo is not that hard is brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom the solution to finding the questions people ask online . See why thousands of people use us every day . Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom . If you want to get in touch , have any questions , I'd love to hear from you . I'm at channel five .
On Twitter , you can email me at podcast at keywordspeopleusecom . Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard .