How To: Serve Better RSS Feeds To Your Subscribers

Most of your focus on optimizing your WordPress sites is probably on the look and feel of your design and the layout of specific things. Getting that content to display as perfectly as possible. Given that fact it’s a shame we spend as close to none time on optimizing our RSS Feed output. Sure, we hook our feeds up to Feedburner, but most don’t even select the ‘Optimize Feed’ option. Which is strange considering the ratio of people that view your content via RSS versus the actual site.

RSS is supposed to deliver your content as clean as possible, but there are however a few things you can do to optimize the output of your RSS. Here a few plugins that can help you out:

Align RSS Images

Align RSS Images is a simple plugin that scans your RSS feed and ensures that every image has the correct alignment and margin settings. This is useful if you want the images to appear correctly aligned not just on your site, but also in your RSS feed. Download Align RSS Images.

RSS Syndication Options

A plugin to let the administrator modify the RSS sy:updateperiod and sy:updatefrequency parameters in their RSS feed (see http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/). These parameters tell RSS aggregators how frequently they can expect changes to your blog, and should in theory affect crawl rates. Download RSS Syndication Options.

Ozh’ Better Feed

Your feed, on steroids : add a custom footer to RSS items with, for example, a copyright notice, a “Read More (400 words)” links, an “Add to del.icio.us” link, a list of related entries, or anything really (even custom PHP functions). Compatible with Feedburner or similar services. Download Ozh’ Better Feed.

Feed Delay

I think the title pretty much says it all but Feed Delay lets you stop a feed from immediately being published. Plus, you can also disable individual posts from appearing in feeds. Download Feed Delay.

Smart Youtube

What’s a YouTube plugin doing in this list you may ask? This plugin allows you to embed video’s in your feed. As explained on the plugin site: Smart Youtube is a Wordpress Youtube Plugin that allows you to easily insert Youtube videos/playlists in your post, comments and in RSS feed.

The main purpose of the plugin is to correctly embed youtube videos into your blog post. The video will be shown in full in your RSS feed as well. Download Smart YouTube.

Extra Resources:

If you’d like to even optimize your feeds more there a dozens of hacks you can have a look at.

This article first appeared on BloggingPro: Optimizing Your WordPress RSS Feeds