No matter what service or product you sell or what industry your business belongs to, providing high-quality information to your blog users is vitally important. For example, if your business provides taxation services, you may want to include information from the taxation office, such as news or updates on tax rulings, small business tax tips, etc.

The problem with providing this type of information, however, is that it is very time-consuming. You have to sort through, research, and organize a lot of information, check your facts, write and edit content (or hire someone to do this for you), and then ensure that this information is continually kept up-to-date. As you can imagine, this is not only a huge amount of work but most of the information you are dealing with is beyond your control.

Fortunately, there is an easier way to regularly provide your users with great information.

It’s called RSS …

(RSS - One of the easiest ways to provide your subscribers with up-to-date information)

The Ultimate Guide To WordPress RSS

RSS – A Basic Overview

• RSS, which, according to some definitions is short for Rich Site Summary, is more commonly referred to as Really Simple Syndication. It it is also called a “feed” or “newsfeed”.
• RSS lets content publishers automatically syndicate their content so that their site readers can read it without having to keep revisiting their site to check for updates.
• Feeds are often used to publish information that is frequently updated, such as blog posts, news headlines, video lists, etc., which users can choose to subscribe to.
• Essentially, an RSS feed is a structured XML (XML = Extensible Markup Language) document that includes either full or summarized text along with metadata like published date, feed author, etc. It allows people to subscribe to content on sites that publish feeds and then view any updates posted on these websites through an RSS feed reader. Conversely, RSS feeds also enable publishers to automatically syndicate their web content.
• Feeds can be made available in different formats and read by different feed readers. Some of these include RSS feeds, Atom feeds and RDF feeds. All of these formats, however, use a standard XML file format to ensure that feeds are compatible with different devices, feed readers, and programs.
• Many sites and software applications also let you combine multiple RSS feeds to receive news and updates from multiple sources.

In this detailed guide, we will explain where your RSS feed is located, how to use your WordPress RSS feed to get your content syndicated online, and how to add content from other websites and blogs to your site via RSS.

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds

Content syndication is a very powerful and legitimate way of sharing web content. RSS Feeds provide a simple way for web users to stay up-to-date with the latest information posted on different websites and blogs.

First, let’s look at how content syndication is used.

Many digital agencies rely heavily on content syndication to publish news from other news agencies around the world.

Syndication allows most leading digital content publishers to deliver readers the most recent news headlines and stories from all over the planet without actually having to hire more content writers everywhere in the world …

(Media publications use syndication to publish news and stories from other news agencies all around the planet.)

Syndication is used to share content legitimately with other sites. Global media publications syndicate their news stories using feeds …

(Syndication is a legitimate way of sharing information)

Most sites actually would like you to share their content. Content syndication not only allows valuable information to be shared, but it can also send visitors back to the site that originally created theoriginally created and published the content being syndicated. This can be an effective way to generate web traffic.

Many online newspapers and major online media publications have an RSS feed section (look for menu links that say ”RSS”, “Syndication”, or “Newsfeeds” in them, or just search for “name of site/keyword + rss” – e.g. “nytimes rss”, “times of india rss”, “sydney morning herald rss”, etc.) …

(Most leading online media publications contain an RSS feed section. Source: SMH RSS )

Clicking on a site’s RSS links section brings up a directory of RSS feeds for different content topics on the site …

(A site’s list of different RSS feeds. Image Source: nytimes.com)

Each of these feed items allows readers to access information from different areas of the site (e.g. technology news, entertainment news, editorials, etc.)

Feed sections can also contain further feed subcategories …

(Feed sections can also include subcategory feeds. Source: latimes.com feeds)

Note: An RSS feed is simply a URL. All you have to do to use a feed is copy the URL and paste it into software that can translate the feed into something readable. We’ll cover this further below.

Content Syndication – Benefits

Syndicating content from someone else’s website or blog on your website has some obvious benefits. It not only gives someone else’s website additional exposure online, it also helps you by freeing you up from having to create that content …

(Content Syndication Benefits Someone Else’s Website And Yours!)

While adding a feed from another site is a great way to add content to your site without having to create it, it’s worth keeping in mind that there are benefits in getting other websites to use your content.

When other websites and blogs syndicate content using your RSS feed, you have the opportunity to get increased exposure online and drive new visitors …

(Try to get visitors to syndicate your RSS feed … it will help increase your exposure online!)

Your WordPress Feed

By default, WordPress automatically publishes a feed of all your posts, allowing other online users to syndicate your content on their sites.

Depending on your WordPress site’s theme, there are a few ways to get your RSS feed:

1) If your theme displays the Meta widget on the sidebar …

(The feed page will show the number of posts as you have specified in the Reading Settings section)

Display Full Text Or Summary Of Posts In Your RSS Feed

Another setting in your Reading Settings section that affects your RSS feed is whether to display posts as full text, or just as a summary …

(WordPress Settings – Reading Settings – Display ‘Full Text’ or ‘Summary’ for posts in your feed)

Post Excerpts can also affect how the content in your feed appears …

(Post excerpts can affect how your feed content will appear)

For a detailed step-by-step tutorial about using Post excerpts in WordPress, go here:

• How To Use Post Excerpts In WordPress

View The Content Of Your RSS Feeds

As mentioned previously, all that’s required to view the content of an RSS feed is to copy the feed’s URL to your clipboard and paste it into a feedreader, i.e. an application that reads and translates feeds into readable content for humans.

Let’s take a look at how this works.

First, go to a website whose content you want to syndicate and search for an RSS feed icon using any of the methods described earlier …

(Look for a ’subscribe to feed’ link or button. Image source: http://www.yourcoffeeguru.com)

Next, copy the feed URL to your clipboard …

(Copy the URL of your feed to your clipboard)

If you want, you can check the feed content by pasting the feed URL into a feed reader …

(Paste your feed URL into a feedreader to view the feed content. Source: Feedreader.com)

Like feedreaders, WordPress also has the ability to process RSS feeds.

How To Add An RSS Feed To Your Site

Let’s show you how to add RSS content from another site to yours.

How To Add A Feed To Your WordPress Sidebar

As mentioned earlier, no matter what industry your business is in, you could add to your site the latest content from an industry-related government department or authoritative site in your industry simply by importing content from their RSS feed. You can easily display a range of information on your WordPress site such as news, social media comments, or content from thousands of sites using the WordPress RSS widget.

Let’s add RSS content to the WordPress sidebar navigation menu …

(Add content from an RSS feed to your sidebar)

First, find a website that publishes content that you want to display on your sidebar and copy its feed URL …

(Copy the feed URL to the clipboard)

Next, go to your WordPress Dashboard > Appearance > Widgets and paste the feed into an RSS widget …

(Widgets Area – RSS Widget)

To learn more about using sidebar widgets, go here:

• How To Add Widgets To The WordPress Blog Sidebar Section

Load your website in your web browser. The content can now be seen in your sidebar (or wherever the RSS widget has been added) …

(RSS Feed Content Added To WP Sidebar)

Add Your WordPress RSS Feed To Search Consoles

You can add your WordPress RSS feed to Google and Bing’s search consoles. This will help them index your content faster.

(WordPress RSS feed added to Google Search Console)

Adding your site’s RSS feed to search consoles is simple, fast, easy, and requires no technical skills. For a step-by-step tutorial, go here:

• How To Set Up Webmaster Accounts

Adding RSS Feed Content To Your Posts

What if you want to add content from RSS feeds to posts instead of a sidebar?

You can easily do this using plugins. Just search inside your ’Add Plugins’ screen for RSS Post, RSS feed to post, etc.

(‘Add Plugins’ screen – WordPress RSS plugins)

Note: These plugins typically require configuration – visit the plugin sites for full instructions, or contact us for help with plugin configuration.

The plugins below are useful for adding feed content to posts, or “autoblog” (An auto blog is a blog with content that is automatically gathered and compiled from RSS feeds):

WPeMatico

(WPeMatico – WordPress Plugin)

WPeMatico is an easy to use plugin that lets you publish posts automatically from RSS/Atom feeds that you choose.

You can manage all of your imported feeds and arrange feeds into campaigns.

For more details, go here:

• WPeMatico – WordPress Plugin

WP RSS Aggregator

(WP RSS Aggregator WP Plugin)

WP RSS Aggregator is a comprehensive RSS feed importer and auto blogging plugin for WordPress that offers premium add-ons for additional functionality.

For example, the Feed to Post extension is an advanced importer that lets you import RSS feeds directly into posts or any other custom post type.

For more details, go here:

• WP RSS Aggregator

RSS Post Importer

(RSS Post Importer Plugin)

RSS Post Importer can be used to curate, import, syndicate, merge and display full-text feeds (RSS, Atom, etc.) on your WordPress website or blog.

The plugin fetches an RSS feed and publishes the full content of every item in the feed as a separate post.

For more details, go here:

• RSS Post Importer

Powr RSS Feed

(Powr RSS Feed)

The POWr RSS Feed plugin allows you to automatically combine content from a number of different sources using RSS feeds.

The plugin also lets you display images, videos, and article content, adjust the priority of different feeds, use custom colors, fonts, borders, and more. It also displays feeds correctly on all computers, phones, and tablets and supports text in every language.

The premium plugin version contains many additional features, such as the ability to display different feeds, manually accept or reject posts, and more.

For more details, go here:

• Powr RSS Feed

WP Pipes

(WP Pipes Plugin For WordPress)

The WP Pipes plugin is a powerful data migration plugin that allows you to create curate content from RSS feeds, Google News, and many other sources.

This plugin provides loads of features like CSV importing for posts/WooCommerce, RSS feed creator, autoblogging, auto post to Facebook/Twitter/LinkedIn, export WordPress posts as iTunes podcasts, create Google XML sitemaps, and help take your WordPress CMS to new levels.

For more details, go here:

• WP Pipes

FeedWordPress

(FeedWordPress)

FeedWordPress provides flexible syndication options for WordPress site-generated content.

As stated in the FeedWordPress site …

FeedWordPress is an open-source Atom/RSS aggregator for the WordPress blog publishing platform. You set up feeds that you choose, and FeedWordPress syndicates posts from those sources into your WordPress posts table, where they can be displayed by your WordPress templates like any other post — but with additional meta-data, so that your templates can properly attribute the post to the source it came from.

FeedWordPress can be used to create aggregator sites, or display all of your online activity into a Lifestream.

For more details, go here:

• FeedWordPress – WordPress Plugin

Autoblog by WPMUDev

(Autoblog Plugin)

Autoblog is an easy-to-use plugin that can be set-up very quickly, with no coding required and no complicated instructions. Simply copy and paste in your feed URL, give the feed a name of your choosing (for admin purposes) and select the blog to post content to.

For more details, go here:

• Autoblog WordPress Plugin

RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types

(RSS Includes Pages)

Install RSS Includes Pages to include pages in your RSS feed in addition to posts (by default WordPress only includes posts in your RSS feed).

For more details, go here:

• RSS Includes Pages and Custom Post Types Plugin

WordPress RSS – Useful Tips

Tip #1 – Comment RSS Feeds

WordPress makes available RSS feeds of your post comments in addition to giving online users access to RSS feeds of your latest posts.

To see this feed, go to the ‘Meta’ widget area on your sidebar menu (note: this section may not be visible on some themes) and click on Comments RSS …

(WordPress Comments Feed)

Comments posted on your site by visitors and users will appear in your Comments RSS page …

(Comments feed items displayed using Firefox)

Like post entries, your comments feed content will display differently depending on which browser you are using …

(Comments feed entries displayed with Google Chrome)

Again, you can check what the comments feed contains by pasting the URL of the feed into an online feed reader …

(Paste the URL of your comments feed into a feedreader to view the content. Image: http://feedreader.com/online)

Note: If the Meta section is not displaying on your theme, you can view the Comments RSS section of your site by opening up a browser and typing in the following URL:

• http://www.yourdomain.com/comments/feed
• http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/comments/feed (if your WP installation is in a subfolder, e.g. “blog”)

Tip #2 – Using Feeds For Individual Items

Being able to create an RSS feed for a specific post item can be useful. For example, you may want to add feeds from specific posts to RSS directories, or you may have created a valuable resource that other online users will want to syndicate.

The formula for making an RSS feed for specific post items is shown below:

(Individual Post RSS Feed)

To create the above feed, copy the post URI, and append “/feed/?withoutcomments=1” to the end.

(Single Post Feed)

Note: By default, if you only add “/feed” to the end of the URI of your post, WordPress will return the comments for that post, not actual content of the post itself.

Tip #3 – Using Category RSS Feeds

Some your site visitors may only want to syndicate content from one or two categories. They may not want to subscribe to all of your site’s content.

With WordPress, you can easily create category feeds.

Just use the format below:

(Use this format for WP category RSS feed)

Select and copy the category link address to your clipboard …

(Copy the selected category link address …)

Add “feed” to the end of it …

(WordPress category RSS feed format)

Your feed now only contains content posted in that category …

(Category-specific RSS feed)

The WordPress Codex also provides different ways to create feeds not just for post categories, but also feeds for tags, authors, search, etc.

For this example, let’s create a feed for a specific post category using the format shown below:

(Post Category feed format. Source: WordPress Codex)

Here is the feed format WordPress recommends using. In this example, the post category ID is ’42’. We’ll need to replace the post category ID and the domain name …

(WordPress post category feed format)

To find the post category ID, go to Posts > Categories …

(Posts > Categories menu)

Locate the post category you want and hover your mouse over the title to reveal its unique ID …

(Post Category ID)

In our example, the post category ID is ’29’ and the post category feed format we need to use for this specific category with our domain name looks like this …

(Post category feed format with domain name and ID)

Copy and paste the feed into your browser and hit enter …

(Paste the feed into your browser)

This will display the feed for that specific category …

(RSS feed of a specific post category)

Note that in this example, WordPress automatically converted the feed format we pasted into the browser into the category feed we had used in the previous section of this tutorial …

(Post category feed format)

Here is the feed format again …

(Post category feed)

In this case, the simplest way to create additional feeds for specific categories is to simply change the post category slug …

(Change the post category slug to create a new category specific feed)

Paste the edited feed into your web browser and hit enter to display the content for that specific category’s feed …

(Post category feed content)

Now that you have a method for creating feeds for specific post categories (or tags, authors, etc.), you can even create a directory or list of individual feeds for visitors.

Tip #4 – Set Up A List Of RSS Feeds

You can create a feeds list that allows your readers to subscribe to content in specific categories, just like the larger websites do …

(Provide A List Of Feeds)

You can also link an RSS button graphic like the one shown below to category feeds and then create a table or a list of your feeds on a separate page …

(RSS button graphic. Image Source: http://www.public-domain-photos.com/free-cliparts/computer/other/rss_button_roman_bertle_01-2522.htm)

For a detailed step-by-step tutorial on inserting tables into WordPress posts and pages, go here:

• Adding Tables In WordPress Posts And Pages

WordPress RSS – Notes

Feeds can be customized in various different ways, such as adding videos to feeds, ads, etc. Some of these feed customizations require code editing skills.

WordPress allows various RSS feed configurations that do not require touching code. Below are examples of some of the kinds of feed formats you can create …

(WordPress RSS – Feed Types)

Here are the different feed types, descriptions, and feed examples shown above:

• Feed Type: All Posts
• Description: Content feed – Feed that contains your latest entries
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/

• Feed Type: All Comments
• Description: Comments feed – Feed that displays the latest comments left on your blog
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/comments/feed/

• Feed Type: Individual Posts
• Description: RSS feed for a post
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/title-of-your-blog-post/feed/

• Feed Type: Individual Posts Comments
• Description: RSS Feed that contains the latest comments made on single post entries
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/post-title/feed/

• Feed Type: Archives
• Description: Day – Feed containing latest post entries in each archive
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2013/02/19/feed/

• Feed Type: Archives
• Description: Month – Feed containing the latest items in each archive
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2015/11/feed/

• Feed Type: Archives
• Description: Year – Contains latest entries in each archive
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/2018/feed/

• Feed Type: Search Results
• Description: Displays latest entries for a search query
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/search/term/feed/

• Feed Type: Custom Post Type
• Description: Displays the latest posts for a custom type (e.g. book)
• Example Feed: http://yourdomain.com/feed/?post_type=book

One more thing …

It’s a good idea to let visitors know that they can subscribe to your feed. Place your subscribe buttons somewhere visible …

(Remember to promote your feeds!)

Finally, keep in mind that other website owners will only want to subscribe to your content if you publish great content that informs, engages, and entertains. In other words, provide high-quality information that will add value to their sites and benefit their visitors.

(Easily add someone else’s content and get other users to syndicate your content using WordPress and RSS!)

If you need help coming up with content ideas subscribe to our FREE content creation course using the form below:

Also, don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS feed 🙂

Resources:

• Feed Images – Visit sites like FeedIcons or search online (e.g. “free rss icons”, “RSS icon”, etc.) for sites containing downloadable RSS images and icons.
• RSSBoard.org – The RSS Advisory Board is an independent organization responsible for publishing RSS specifications, providing guidance to developers who create RSS applications and helping to further the understanding of RSS.
• Wikipedia.org/RSS – Learn more about the benefits of using RSS.
• WordPress.org – WordPress software documentation repository. Go here for more information about RSS feeds in WordPress.

Congratulations! Now you know where your RSS feed is located, how to syndicate your content online using RSS feeds, and how to display someone else’s content on your site using RSS feeds.

Hopefully, now you have a better understanding of issues that can affect your website and how WordPress can help you build a better business online. To learn more about the benefits of using WordPress for a business website please see other posts on this site.

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