Writing in the Rankbench editor

The editor is where a guest post is written or revised, whether you started blank or imported a document.

Its advantage over writing somewhere else is the panels: the destination site's rules sit beside the draft, so you are writing against them rather than checking afterwards.

Writing

An ordinary rich editor. Select text and a small menu offers the inline formatting; put the cursor on an empty line and the block options appear.

The outline builds itself from your headings, so the structure is visible as you go: "Add headings and the outline builds itself."

Autosave

Everything saves as you go, and the state is shown rather than assumed. You will see it saving, and you will see when it is saved.

A draft is never lost, which is what the empty state promises. What that means in practice is you can close the tab.

An article needs a title before autosave can run, so give it one first even if it is a placeholder.

The panels

The site's rules and Topics they take, so the brief you accepted is in front of you.

Images missing alt text, counted, because that is both an accessibility problem and something the receiving site's own audit will raise later.

Links and metrics, a running view of what your links point at.

Editor feedback, which is empty until they ask for something: "Nothing yet. If they ask for changes, their notes appear here."

Readiness, which tells you whether everything the destination site needs is in place, or what is still missing.

Links

Insert them as you would anywhere. Only http, https, mailto and telephone links are kept; anything else is stripped when the article saves.

The wording of a link matters more than usual here. It is what the editor reviews, and it is what the live page is checked against once the article is published.

Images

By URL rather than by upload. The URL has to be HTTPS.

There is no upload button. Images either come in with an imported document or are referenced from somewhere they already live.

Give every image alt text. The panel counts the ones missing it.

Moving on

When the draft is ready, the button takes you to the link review. It reads Review links & continue.

Before the article is ready, the readiness panel says what is missing rather than letting you send an incomplete package.

When editing is locked

Once you send the article, editing locks: "This version is locked while the editors read it. You'll be able to edit again if they ask for changes."

That is deliberate. An editor reading a draft that changes underneath them cannot review anything. If they request changes, it unlocks.

Where to go next

Review and send is the next step. If you would rather write in Google Docs, see importing from Google Docs.