I’ve just launched version 2 of my Artiss Draft List plugin for WordPress and if you’ve not tried it, it’s really worth a punt. In a nutshell, it lists on your blog any posts (and/or pages) that you have in draft. This can provide an ideal, and unique, way to promote posts before they are published. Output is in text so will be picked up by Google, adding SEO advantages (see below).

But let’s get back to the plugin. Once installed you have option to use a sidebar widget, use an in-post (or page) shortcode or even just manually call it via PHP. A new templating system allows you to define exactly how the results are output – yes, you can output a list of draft posts, but what about adding an author name, word count or date of last update? All of this is possible.

It’s all cached so takes as little resource as possible and you can even exclude certain posts from being included in the list (this is done in the editor itself). Finally, you can make sure that the list only includes drafts for a particular time period – for instance, any created in the last month.

Scheduled posts are not excluded either – these can be included and can be indicated via an appropriate icon.

So, how does this help SEO? Well, let’s take a live example from my site. I recently had a product review post in draft. Searching for that product in Google, gave the following result (click to see a larger view)…

As you can see all the top results in Google are for my site – even though the review hasn’t been published. Instead the fact that the text is in the list of drafts within the sidebar has already attracted attention to my site and getting me listed. Of course, this is quite an obscure product so don’t expect top billing in Google for anything as a result. But it does help with your SEO and it give your readers a helpful insight as to what to expect soon.

Download Artiss Draft List from WordPress.org.