What is better to use on your Nav bar: Category Pages or Regular Pages

[Droga5 Agency]

Whats up guys!

So in the last three weeks I've been diving into SEO and currently working on building a couple blogs with wordpress.
It has been a grind to say the least but I'm learning lot's! Anyway..

I have my sites structured and designed for the most part. I'm currently optimizing each page for SEO with AIOSEO.
I just have a question before I go any further:

What is better for SEO: Using category pages or regular pages with the category posts listed? I can't seem to find the answer i'm looking for or at least not an article that goes over the differences. Currently i'm using category pages in my nav bar but for some reason AIOSEO doesn't allow me to edit SEO on them.
I've checked some random blogs that are ranking high for their relative niche and some use category pages in the nav bar, others seem to use stand alone pages.

After some searching and reading articles it seems like the general consensus is that using category pages is better for SEO. I just don't know why AIOSEO wouldn't allow me to edit the SEO on that page..

I've been combing over so many different topics over the last little bit so maybe the answer is a lot simpler than i'm making it out to be. Regardless I figured you guys might have some input!

 

[BakerStreet]

Depends on your site and the purpose of someone clicking there. If its just to distrbute pagerank then category page is fine. If you want someone to buy something, then a regular page is better since you have more markup on a regular page.

What I do is I create a regular page and list all child pages in that category in an accordian at the bottom. You can do that with The Loop in Gutenburg. best of both worlds. Full SEO on-page SEO editing too.

 

[Kaj Kandler]

Don't use Wordpress category pages for your nav bar. Those pages are horrible for any SEO effort. This is especially true if your categories contain beyond 10 entries. As these are by default in most themes paged.

What you want to use is dedicated pages (as opposed to posts) and build hub pages. Which are rich in text and overview of the topic the category stands for. They can be a one-to-one match with the categories, but they should be rich in content.

Ideally, you also link back from the posts to these (self-made) category overviews.
On your home page link not to your latest posts, but to your best-performing (ranking or earnings) pages.