In case you are not familiar with this acronym, RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. The reason that RSS is an important piece of Internet technology is because it let’s people get the latest content that is published on a blog, without having to continually visit a blog to see if it’s been updated. By using an RSS reader (such as Google Reader), people can get updates to a large number of blogs in just one location. When someone “subscribes to your blog’s RSS feed,” that means they have signed up to receive new content in their RSS reader whenever you publish it.
Although WordPress already has RSS technology built into it, there are some things you can do to customize and optimize your blog’s RSS feed. Let’s take a look at some of the most popular methods for making changes to your default WordPress RSS feed:
FeedBurner: If you implement anything that is discussed in this article, it should be to create a FeedBurner feed. By “burning” your RSS feed through FeedBurner, you will be able to publicize, optimize, analyze and monetize your RSS feed. For example, once you sign-up with this free service, not only will visitors to your blog be able to receive your RSS updates through a RSS reader, but they will also be able to choose to receive updates via email. This means that anytime you publish a new blog post, it will be emailed directly to them.
Because WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms, FeedBurner has made it extremely easy to integrate FeedBurner into WordPress.
Full Text Feed: When you publish posts on your blog, you may use the more tag because you only want to display part of your posts on the homepage of your blog. However, this doesn’t mean that you don’t want RSS subscribers to be able to read the full feed.
To ensure that RSS subscribers don’t have to click through to continue reading your post, you can use this simple plugin to deliver your full posts to them.
RSS Footer: One of the only downsides to RSS is that it makes it possible for people to automatically steal your content and syndicate it to their own blog (without your permission). However, while people may still choose to steal your content, you can ensure that you get credit for being the original source by using the RSS Footer plugin.
Once you install the RSS Footer plugin, you will be able to create a footer that will appear at bottom of each post in your RSS feed. In addition to a copyright notice, you can include links back to your blog. This can feed can also be useful if you are interested in selling ads within your RSS feed.
RSSless: While RSS works seamlessly for text content, there are times when multimedia content (such as Flash video) may not appear correctly in an RSS reader. To ensure that your readers know to check out your original post if they want to view the piece of multimedia you embedded, you can use the RSSless plugin to replace that piece of multimedia with a message to anyone viewing the content through your RSS feed.
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