WordPress has a feature which allows you to schedule an article or post to be published at a future date. This feature has benefits for website marketers interested in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and website promotion. Since search engines like fresh content and actively updated websites, you can benefit from that fact by delaying and spacing out the publish date of new posts.

Continuous WordPress Blog Updating

Sometimes I find I have many new things I want to get up on one or more of my Blogs, while other times, several days may pass before I have something to write about, or time to sit down and write. Rather than have six new posts or articles added to my Blog in one day, I now start staggering the release date for each article so that no more than one or two posts are released in any given day. I’ve noticed after using this approach for a month or two, that the search engine crawlers (robots) tend to visit my site more frequently since they have "learned" that the site is actively updated.

Note that even though you may queue up many articles to publish at some future date, you can always change your mind and release any of the posts prior to the scheduled publish date.

How to Schedule a WordPress Post for Future Release

So what’s the secret to delaying a post in WordPress? When you’ve finished editing/writing your post but before clicking the Publish button, switch to Advanced Editing mode if you’re not already in it. Scroll down the window in Advanced Edit Mode until you find the "Edit Time" fields. Click the checkbox for "Edit Timestamp" then change the date and time fields, setting them to whatever future time on which you want to release the article. Now (*Important*), scroll back up and click the "Publish" button (NOT the Save button). That’s it! I’ve included a picture of the Edit Timestamp section under WordPress’s Advanced edit area.

Viewing Your Scheduled Posts

To review the list of posts scheduled for future release, login to your WordPress Admin control panel and click the menu for "Manage". Your posts should be listed there, with the publish date in the left-hand column. Note: that you may have to browse a future month to see other posts waiting to be published. But wait, WordPress is so cool and well-designed that it shows you your Scheduled Posts in the Dashboard right after you login to your WP-Admin (even better, under each scheduled Post it will display a relative time for when the post is released: e.g., 23hrs, 2 days, etc.).

When you edit one of the future-posts, the Edit Timestamp checkbox will be unchecked, and the date you originally scheduled will remain the same. If you want to alter that publish date (for example, post it to your web site immediately), just change the timestamp and click the Edit Timestamp checkbox, then press the Publish button.

To recap the reasons why you may want to delay the publishing of your WordPress posts:

• You’re in a busy writing mode and adding many new articles to your Blog all at once, but you want the search engines to think your site is constantly updating with fresh content, thus you delay your new articles so they get pushed out at a consistent rate.
• Because this technique is easier than saving posts as Draft then having to remember to login and Publish the post at a future date. Let WordPress work for you!
• You may have an announcement to make and want to write the post now, but have it automatically go up at a late date and time. With the technique described here, you won’t have to remember to change the post from Draft to Published.

You can find more articles on WordPress Blogging Techniques here.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 2nd, 2005 at 7:35 pm and is filed under Web Site Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Blogging, WordPress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. | Permalink