RSS feeds are a great tool for curating and sharing content from a range of different sources relevant to your business or WordPress website – but only if you use them effectively.
Ensuring that all of your aggregated content remains relevant and high-quality can be challenging. Frankly, the manual approach of sifting through all of your RSS feeds to find appropriate content for your audience is a time-consuming process that can turn this tool into a hindrance rather than an asset. Thankfully, there is a better solution.
Automating the process with the help of RSS filters can transform your WordPress site into a real powerhouse. As well as speeding up the process, it will maximize the volume and quality of your curated content. Managing RSS feeds has never looked better.
In this article, we’ll cover different solutions for filtering your curated content and introduce you to one of the best tools for curating, filtering, and sharing content on your WordPress website. Let’s get started!
Understanding and managing RSS feeds
Before we get into the details of how to best manage RSS feeds, we need to answer a basic question: What exactly are RSS feeds? We’ve covered this in detail in our dedicated beginners’ guide, but in a nutshell, an RSS (really simple syndication) feed is a list of updates from a website or blog that you can subscribe to using an RSS reader.
In other words, it can be thought of as a customized feed of content that comes from multiple sources and includes various types of media, including blog posts, videos, and podcasts. When an individual user creates an RSS feed, it is likely to prioritize the websites they visit. However, businesses and digital publishers can use RSS feeds to deliver relevant content to their readers or customers.
RSS feeds are a powerful tool that gives users another reason to keep coming back to your site while simultaneously strengthening your position as an authority in your field without having to produce vast volumes of content yourself.
That said, managing RSS feeds can pose several challenges. With over 200 million active websites currently online, RSS feeds may encounter irrelevant or duplicate content, while finding high-quality sources and managing large volumes of content can be difficult too. Consequently, the benefits of RSS news feeds and content aggregation can become severely compromised.
Whether you employ RSS feeds to curate content for your own use or intend to publish and share curated content with an audience, efficient RSS feed filtering is an essential step toward better content management. Otherwise, the RSS reader will fail to deliver the high-quality content that you or your customers deserve.
When done well, though, your RSS app will deliver the best content from the best sources directly to your WordPress site.
Streamlining your RSS feed with filters
The concept of RSS filtering is fairly straightforward: it streamlines content curation, both for personal use and sharing with audiences, by prioritizing content relevant to your preferred subject matter.
Incredibly, two in three RSS users do not even realize that they are using them. Less surprisingly, then, very few people are using RSS feed items to their full potential. RSS feed filtering is easily one of the most effective ways for web pages and individual users to get more out of RSS feeds.
A filtered RSS feed takes the use of RSS news feeds to the next level with immediate and ongoing results. The benefits include but are not limited to:
- Removing irrelevant or low-quality content from RSS news feeds.
- Eliminating duplicate content from appearing in the news feed.
- Improving the overall relevance and using the RSS reader to achieve personalization.
- Enhancing the content consumer experience for yourself or website visitors.
- Saving time by avoiding the need to filter content through manual efforts.
- Maintaining a regular feed of content, even when you’re not available.
- Preventing the risk of your RSS feed becoming too saturated or overwhelming for users.
- Ensuring that content is curated exclusively from reputable sources.
- Automatically including your content in the aggregated lists.
- Stopping potentially harmful (to the user or your reputation) content from inclusion.
Filtered RSS feeds can be used in many ways, too. They can educate or entertain users on a subject, improve workflows by having an organized feed of info in one place, or help users save time by not having to check multiple sources for potential updates.
RSS feeds can be filtered in several different ways. The first option is to filter by category, which means your news feed will only show content that aligns with your topic. This can be a very useful option when aggregating content from websites that cover multiple subjects, including ones that aren’t of interest to you. For example, your basketball accessories store may want basketball news from Bleacher Report but won’t be interested in soccer and other sports.
Another option is to filter news feeds by source. This means the RSS reader will only receive news from your approved outlets. The third (and usually best) filtering method is to filter the RSS feed through keywords. In this instance, only content that mentions a specific keyword or phrase is included. This is especially useful when the RSS feed relates to a niche topic.
One of the most efficient ways to filter RSS feeds by keyword is using WP RSS Aggregator’s keyword filtering feature.
Filtering your RSS feeds by keyword with WP RSS Aggregator
Knowing that you want to implement RSS feed filtering is one thing, but knowing how to streamline your content curation processes is another altogether. When looking to add filters to a personal RSS feed, online tools like siftrss enable you to do this through a manual approach, while Zapier is useful for automatic feed filtering
When you want to use RSS feed filtering for commercial purposes and give your audience a stream of relevant content, however, WP RSS Aggregator is the best solution. Among other features, this powerful WordPress plugin allows you to:
- Curate content from unlimited RSS or Atom feeds.
- Automatically attribute sources and authors to your aggregated content.
- Easily create templates for displaying your curated content.
- Import content as WordPress posts or other custom post types.
- Filter imported content based on keywords, phrases, and/or tags.
In short, WP RSS Aggregator allows you to deliver the most relevant content and ensure that the design of your RSS feeds perfectly reflects your website. It streamlines the process for website owners while simultaneously improving the UX for readers.
To filter your RSS news feed with WP RSS Aggregator, follow the simple five-step process below.
Step 1: Install the plugin
After downloading WP RSS Aggregator, go to Plugins > Upload New > Upload the plugin .zip file > Activate. You can then follow the simple setup wizard so that the RSS plugin is ready to use.
Step 2: Add RSS feed sources
To add your first RSS feed source, you’ll first need to find the feed source URL. There are a few ways to do this:
- For many websites, the feed URL will simply be the website URL followed by /feed.
- You can also use a Chrome extension like Get RSS Feed URL to access feed sources.
- To find a WordPress RSS feed with specific parameters (i.e., posts by a particular author, with a specific tag, or that are part of a select category), check out the WordPress Codex for detailed instructions.
Once you have the feed URL ready, navigate to RSS Aggregator > Feed Sources > Add New. From here, add the RSS feed URL and name your feed. You can also limit the number of posts to be imported from the feed source or configure the feed to only import content with unique titles.
Step 3: Add keyword and tag filtering to specific feed sources
You can set up separate filtering options for individual feed sources with RSS Aggregator. To do this, go to your chosen feed source then scroll down to Keyword Filtering.
Once you have selected the specific feed source, you can choose to filter the feed by the following parameters:
- Only posts that include specified words or phrases.
- Only posts that don’t include specified words or phrases.
- Only posts that feature a specific tag.
- Only posts without a given tag.
This functionality not only enables you to curate only content that is relevant to your target audience, but also gives you the ability to filter out any inappropriate content in order to provide an optimal user experience on your blog.
Step 4: Automatically publish imported content as posts
One of the main benefits of using WP RSS Aggregator to curate and filter content is the efficiency it grants to your site’s content publication strategy. Using the plugin, you can set up automatic publication of imported content as posts, pages, or any custom post type, in a matter of clicks.
To do this, simply navigate to the settings of the RSS feed source you want to configure. From here, you can choose the specific post type that you want the imported content to be published as and configure other settings such as the post format, image import settings, and more.
If you want to apply these settings globally to all your RSS feed sources, you can do this from RSS Aggregator > Settings > Feed to Post.
Step 5: Set up global keyword and tag filtering settings
As well as filtering keywords and tags on individual feeds, it is possible to set global settings. This means that your chosen keyword filtering parameters will be applied to all feeds.
To do this, navigate to RSS Aggregator > Settings > Filtering. You can then add general filtering parameters using the method described in Step 3.
For more information on how to customize your RSS source feeds with WP RSS Aggregator, check out our complete guide on WordPress RSS feed setup.
Take action: Optimize your RSS feed management with WP RSS Aggregator today
If you’re currently using RSS feeds or intend to start harnessing the power of content curation on your WordPress website, the benefits of RSS feed filtering are clear. They streamline the content management and consumption processes to support publishers while, crucially, providing a better experience for the end user.
The advantages of using WP RSS Aggregator for keyword filtering are plentiful. Positive results include improved content relevance, added quality, easier management of large content volumes, and the ability to keep your news feeds flowing at all times. When combined with the ability to control the design for a better reader experience, it’s no wonder that over 60,000 people choose WP RSS Aggregator to curate and aggregate content.
If you want to take your content curation and RSS feed management to the next level, try WP RSS Aggregator today. The future of your WordPress website’s content strategy has never looked better!
