Be sure to do this one thing BEFORE you hit the WordPress publish button
Have you ever published a post in WordPress and then viewed the post only to find there was a typo or some other problem? I’ve done this all too many times. Not a problem, right? Just go in and edit the post and hit “Update”. Problem solved, eh? Well, not exactly. And for several reasons.
The most significant reason to make sure your blog post is accurate before hitting publish is that the search engines instantly pick up your content via your RSS Feed. The search engines then quickly index your first publish. Even if you go back and update your post (which obviously you should do), your feed still doesn’t update the search engine results. The damage has already been done. And things like Google will publish your typos and errors for the world to see.
That’s why it’s so important to thoroughly read your post from top to bottom BEFORE you hit the publish button in WordPress. Maybe even re-read it twice. Before publishing, I’d preview it to make sure it was formatted and typed the way you want it to be BEFORE hitting the publish button for the first time.
Also if you have a readership, then they’ll all get to see the mistake. And trying to change that in WordPress is NOT easy. I tried several things, republished the feed, deleted the post entirely and re-entered it (a really bad idea), I actually had to go into the MySQL Database and manually delete the post (but by then the damage was already done.). Hopefully people will be understanding, but it’s just not all professional.
In the past, I’ve been guilty of creating a post and haphazardly hitting the Publish button and then just correcting it later. But recently I wrote a post that contained a significant typo that changed the entire context of the blog post. And even though I updated it, Google and my feed readers had already indexed the old post and it was just plain embarrassing.
I certainly don’t consider myself a great writer, but to put out content that isn’t even what I intended due to a typo is easily correctable before you ever publish. And those errors really shouldn’t ever happen if one is careful enough.
In short, take the time to proof read your blog post BEFORE hitting the Publish button, even if you are in a hurry. And don’t just rely on the spell-checker (which is what I tend to do).
Re-reading your post is easy to do and just makes sense, in particular because the software isn’t all that forgiving.
