There are some days when you have a lot to say and others when you just can’t find time to get a post out. Even if you can find time to write it may be at 3am and no one will be listening when you press publish.

You may also write a lot on the weekends or need to publish posts when you are on vacation or on a trip.

If you find you are running into one of these situations then the ability to pre-write some articles and delay the time of publishing could be just what you need.

In WordPress it is really easy to schedule posts for later publishing.

In the Publish box on the top right of your Add New Post page you will see three settings.

Status: which can be draft or pending if you need your editor to read your posts first

Visibility: Which allows you to make the post Public, Private and Password Protected.

And what we need is the

Publish: setting that allows you to publish immediately or change the date of the post.

To hold a post for later publishing you would set the date and time in the box  and then when you press the Publish button like you normally would the post will wait until that time and then be published.

This means if you have plugins setup to announce to Twitter or other social networks … or if you have ping servers setup .. the announcement of the page will happen at the time of publishing.

Prior to that date and time your visitors will not be able to see your page.

What about PreDating your Posts?

This is a great idea if you need to add a lot of content to a category and you do not want to flood your current posts loop on your front page or categories.

For instance lets say your Blog is about Restaurants and you want to add a directory of places to eat to one of your categories as a reference to your readers. The content is important but you do not need to put 200 posts on your front page of just restaurant after restaurant.

Pre date the posts to a previous month and turn off your Social Network Announcement plugins and you can add this content without disturbing your readers.

As you add more restaurants later you may only add 1 or 2 a day maybe so it will not be a problem for your readers.

What about Syndicated RSS Content?

This can get tricky. If you use a plugin that reads a RSS Feed and creates posts then you may find two things happen.

Either the RSS Feed will have a specific time the post was published on the other site or a set time for it to be published on your site OR you will have a flood of posts that are published every time your RSS Feeds are read.

In this case it is probably best to hold your RSS Feed Content that you are syndicating from an outside site and then schedule the posts to be published on a time that won’t flood your Announcement Services or readers.

Will Scheduling Posts Help my Search Engine Rank?

Well it is difficult to say but most people in the SEO side of site management including search engine techs will tell you it is a good idea to have content that is updated regularly.

Meaning you could put up 5,000 pages over night by simply uploading a database full of posts… but once it is indexed thats it.

I think depending on the type of reader you have  you may be better off scheduling posts if you find you are in a situation where more then a few will be posted in a short period of time…