Whether you are cranking out 1, 2 or more pieces of content every day, DO NOT click the “Publish” button. Even if you intend to publish it, do not click on Publish. You first want to make sure it reads correctly, your spelling and grammar look and sound right when you read it back to yourself out loud, and that all of your Heading Tags and images are correct.

You want to do this from the perspective of your website reader by viewing your page in the same way your website visitor will see it. So how can you accomplish this without publishing your content? By using the “Save Draft” button and then clicking on the “Preview” button. See below image.

USING SAVE DRAFT

I use the “Save Draft” button all the time when I create my content. I never create content and click “Publish” without first previewing what my content will look like when it is live. I also like to give myself about a days-time to really go through my finished content. The only way to do that safely and effectively without publishing it is to save your content as a draft.

Another great feature of using “Save Draft” allows you to change the permalink without having to worry about causing a 404 error. You can change the permalink as many times as you want without any problems because the content is not yet published. Once you click on “Publish” then any changing of the permalink has to be done carefully and correctly to avoid crawl errors by Googlebot.

So by saving your content as draft you can change and modify keywords, content and links without causing any problems. Once everything is perfect to the way you want it, then click “Publish.” This is why I always use “Save Draft” because I can make sure that every factor of the content is correct before I publish it live. Plus this gives me the leisure time of a day or two to make sure everything is perfect such as keywords, images and internal links.

There is NO need to rush your content live. Too many times I see WA members asking if they can change the keywords or title in a published post because they found something better. After you publish it you do not want to change it, other than tweaking and adding to the content. Once Google indexes your content it is best to leave it as is and not "change" anything important like permalinks and keywords.