Use WordPress Different Category RSS Feeds for Search Engine Optimization

We all are familiar with the WordPress main RSS feed for the whole Blog but only few bloggers know that WordPress provides them each Category and Comment RSS feeds separately. These feeds can be used other than just making them available for subscription. I have used these individual feeds very successfully for Search engine optimization purposes. But first let’s see what WordPress provides us.

WordPress Post-Feed Formats for Permalinks

If you have permalinks enabled on your site, your main-content (posts) feed is accessible via the following URLs, depending on which feed format you would like to use:

http://website.tld/feed/ (RSS 2.0 format)
http://website.tld/feed/rss2/ (RSS 2.0 format)
http://website.tld/feed/rss/ (RSS 0.92 format)
http://website.tld/feed/rdf/ (RDF/RSS 1.0 format)
http://website.tld/feed/atom/ (Atom format)

Category Feeds

To display individual category feed URLs, use either of the following formats 2:

http://domain.tld/category/categoryname/feed/ (Permalink format)
http://domain.tld/wp-rss2.php?cat=33 (Default format)

You can easily fetch these RSS feeds to display Posts as listing with or without summary contents on other landing pages of your Blog or website. These feeds will not just keep the landing pages contents fresh and updated, but it will also enhance the visibility of the posts themselves, apart from makign those pages actually useful for visiotrs by increasing stickiness.

Many blogs talk about a lot of different topics: Design, Animation, Flash, Programming, SEO, osCommerce, etc. SOmetimes, yuo may want to show soem of these category psots as listing on soem other landing page, may be on one of your other website or anywhere else on the same domain.

Assuming you would only like to subscribe or want to use osCommerce’s category. This category URL would be:

https://www.parorrey.com/blog/category/oscommerce/

To get an RSS feed for this category, you just need to add /feed to the end of the URL:

https://www.parorrey.com/blog/category/oscommerce/feed

The most interesting part is that you can easily use this feed url to get the category feed and use it in other sections of your website, wherever you have to show the posts for any specific section. I found it extremely useful for showing latest relevant posts while working on some website where I needed to fill the main landing pages with content.

Let’s see how you can implement all of this. FOlow the link where I have rpeviously described how you can display RSS feeds contents on yuor website.

You can use SimplePie php class to to fetch, parse, cache, and display your external RSS Feed anywhere on your website.

You can even merge different RSS feeds using the same SImplePie class, in yet another post I made earlier Merging RSS Feeds With SimplePie PHP RSS and Atom parser.

The possibilittes are endless from SEO point of view if you know what you can do with this content. Even if you do not do it for SEO purposes, it’s still useful to show the relevant content.

Hope that helps.

Cheers!