Real Simple Syndication (RSS) enables site owners to automatically syndicate their content to readers in an easily digestible format. There are a number of WordPressWordPress
plugins to help you manage your blog’s RSS feed, track subscribers, and much more.
Below are 18 of our favorite WordPress plugins for RSS. While we think all of the options we’ve provided are extremely useful, we advise you to only download a few as more will impact your blog’s response time.
Add your own thoughts about the plugins and recommend new ones in the comments.
Analytics & Tracking
BBU’s RSS Feed Campaign Tagger Plugin for WordPress – This plugin will tag the links in your RSS feeds so that you can track how those specific visitors interact with your site, what ads they click, and so on.
Feed Subscriber Stats – This plugin allows you to check how many subscribers you have via FeedBurner from the dashboard of your blog so that you don’t have to go to their site or check the front page of your site.
Feedage Tracker – By adding the Feedage plugin to your blog, you’ll get buttons so people can subscribe from your site, and Feedage will be notified of your RSS and track the total number of subscribers for you.
FeedBurner Widget – A quick and easy plugin for displaying your FeedBurner subscriber number in a widget on your sidebar.
FeedStats – Get valuable statistics about your readers that come from your RSS. You can set options such as seeing their time on a page, exclude specific IPs, limit which site users can see them, set the number of days to track information and more.
RSS Link Tagger for Google Analytics – This plugin will add a special code to your RSS feeds so Google AnalyticsGoogle Analytics
can keep better track of how many of your readers come from RSS feed clicks.
Feed Insertion & Tweaks
Align RSS Images – When WordPress removed the “align” tag to be more compliant with Web standards, they ended up breaking the layout of images in your RSS feeds. While there is a way to correct this manually, this plugin will do it for you automatically so you don’t have to do it manually for every image.
Extra Feed Links – Extra Feed Links allows you to create feeds for category pages, tag pages, search pages, author pages, and comment feeds for single articles and pages.
Feed Comments Number – Feed Comments Number will add an image to your posts in the feed that displays the number of comments the post has. The reason an image is preferable is that it will be updated dynamically in the feed faster than if it is text. If no comments have been left yet, it will display “Add a comment.”
MediaRSS – With MediaRSS you can easily increase the types of media that you can embed in your posts for RSS consumption, such as videos.
RSS Atom Avatar – RSS standards allow you to add your site’s favicon and an avatar to your feed, but it isn’t always easy to figure out how to do this. RSS Atom Avatar will take care of this for you.
RSS Footer – RSS Footer gives you the ability to add text to posts in your feed that will not appear in your standard blog posts. This is an easy way to add a footer to your feeds to show your copyright or just add some extra content as a reward to your subscribers.
RSSupplement – RSSupplement lets you add more WordPress information to your feed such as Sociable buttons, post author credit, copyright notices and a few other little extras.
Special Feed Items – Have you ever wanted to draw special attention to a certain post in your feed? This plugin will allow you to insert a unicode heart before the title of that post so people will be more likely to notice it. It does not change anything on your actual site.
Management
Disable RSS – If you’re using WordPress as a CMS, Disable RSS can be helpful to you in killing off all of your feeds as you won’t be needing them.
Old Post Promoter – Old Post Promoter will choose posts at random from your published collection and change their publication dates so that they will appear on your front page and in your RSS feed. Note that this does not work if your permalink structure includes dates.
Private RSS – Private RSS allows you to create a separate RSS feed from your main one. While the main one could send out summaries, you could set the private one to do full posts. This would come in handy if you just want your friends to see full posts, or if you want to set up a subscription system for people to have the full feed.
SoJ Tag Feed – This handy little plugin will allow you to create a feed for any tag on your site, so say someone just wants to know when you write about “blogging,” this will generate a feed just for that tag. Also allows you to insert copyright notices to help fight off feed scrapers.
With more than 120 million blogs in existence, how do people find YOUR content on the Internet? The key starts with great search engine optimization (SEO), which is an art and a science that helps search engines discover your content and understand how relevant it is to specific search queries.
You can blog your heart out, but if you don’t have good SEO, then odds are you won’t have many readers. Luckily, the WordPress () plugin community values SEO and has developed a number of plugins to help. Here are 20 of the best SEO plugins to help you choose the right tags, tell search robots what to work on, optimize your post titles and more.
Have another SEO plugin to recommend? Tell us more about it in the comments.
All in One SEO Pack – One of the most popular plugins ever for WordPress, this plugin does a bit of everything for you from helping choose the best post title and keywords, to helping you avoid duplicate content and more.
Automatic SEO Links – Automatic SEO Links allows you to choose a word or phrase for automatic linking, both internal and external, set anchor text, choose if it should be “nofollow” or not, and more. One of the best features of this plugin is that it will only do this for the first occurrence of a word in a post so you don’t have to worry about spamming your post with numerous links to the same thing.
Google XML Sitemaps – An essential tool in any blogger’s armory of SEO tools. While the name only mentions “Google (),” this plugin creates an XML-sitemap that can be read by Ask, MSN and Yahoo also.
HeadSpace2 – This plugin allows you to install all sorts of meta-data, add specific JavaScript and CSS to pages, suggests tags for your posts and a whole lot more.
Meta Robots WordPress plugin – An easy solution for adding robot metadata to any page you choose on your blog. You can use it to make your front page links into “nofollows,” prevent indexing of search pages, disable author and date-based archives, prevent indexing of your login page and numerous other features.
Nofollow Case by Case – This plugin allows you to strip the “nofollow” command from your comments, and then you can apply it to only the comments you don’t wish to support.
Platinum SEO Plugin – The Platinum SEO Plugin offers you such features as automatic 301 redirects for permalink changes, auto-generation of META tags, post slug optimization, help in avoiding duplicate content and a host of other features.
Redirection – For any number of reasons you sometimes need to move a page from one spot on your blog to another, but then you risk losing that page’s status in search results. Redirection helps you with your 301 redirects, captures a log of 404s so you can work on correcting them, sets up an RSS feed for errors and more.
SEO Blogroll – Do you worry that the people you link to in your blogroll are feeding off of your PageRank? With SEO Blogroll you can make separate sections for various groupings of links, with an unlimited number in each, and all of them will receive the “nofollow” attribute.
SEO for Paged Comments – With the introduction of paged comments in WordPress 2.7, there was a potential problem with search engines thinking you had duplicate content as the post would appear on each page. This plugin aims to take care of this issue for you until the folks at WordPress change things up.
SEO friendly and HTML valid subheadings – Some themes for WordPress will confuse your sub-header tags based on the page they are to be displayed on, but this plugin will automatically reset them to make them more SEO friendly by moving them down one spot in the hierarchical tree. In other words, h2 becomes h3, h3 becomes h4 and so on.
SEO Friendly Images – Images can be a great source of traffic as people search for images of various subjects, and this plugin helps you with making sure that you have “alt” and “title” tags on all of your images so that the search engines can properly index them.
SEO No Duplicate WordPress Plugin – If you must have duplicate content on your site for whatever reason, SEO No Duplicate will allow you to state which version of the post search engines should index while ignoring the others.
SEO Post Link – The post slug is the blog title you see in a browser’s URL bar, and if it’s too long, search engines won’t take a liking to it. SEO Post Link comes with an already populated list of words to cut from a title when it turns into a URL to make your post addresses that much friendlier. You can set it so that it’s limited to a certain number of characters, cut short words, cut unnecessary words and more.
SEO Smart Links – Interlinking your blog can be the key to getting more people to read more of your posts, but it is time consuming and tedious to do it by hand. SEO Smart Links does this for you automatically when you tell it what words to link to what URLs, and it also allows you to set “nofollow” and “open in window” comands for the links.
SEO Tag Cloud Widget – Love ‘em or hate ‘em, a lot of people use tag clouds on their blogs. Since their inception they have been fairly unreadable by search engines, but with this plugin they will be converted to an SEO-friendly HTML markup that can be indexed.
SEO Title Tag – Your tags are an important part of your site for making sure that search engines know where to place your posts, and SEO Title Tag focuses exclusively on this. Unlike some other plugins, and WordPress itself, this extension will allow you to add tags to your pages, your main page and even any URL anywhere on your site.
Simple Tags – An extremely popular plugin that focuses on helping you choose the best tags for your posts by offering suggestions, auto-completion of tags as you type, an AJAX admin interface, mass tag editing and a whole lot more.
Sitemap Generator – This is a more customizable sitemap generator than most with options to support multi-level categories and pages, category/page exclusion, permalink support, choices on what to display, options to show number of comments and more.
TGFI.net SEO Wordpress Plugin – This particular plugin will do most of the usual SEO work of optimizing titles and keywords, but it adds a unique twist as it is mainly directed at people who use WordPress as a CMS.