Rank Math Tutorial

In this Rank Math Tutorial, we will explain how to set up Rank Math for your website’s on-page SEO, and migrate from other WordPress SEO plugins including Yoast SEO.

What is Rank Math?

Rank Math is a powerful SEO plugin for WordPress websites.

Rank Math offers a free version WordPress plugin that provides many features to implement your site’s on-page SEO.

You can always upgrade to Rank Math Pro tool (i.e. paid version) to get all the features for search engine optimization of your website.

The topics in this Rank Math tutorial include:

• Install Rank Math WordPress SEO Plugin
• Connect WordPress and Rank Math
• Set Up Rank Math for SEO
• Link Google Search Console and Rank Math
• Configure Sitemap
• SEO Tweats
• Complete the Setup
• Role Manager
• 404 and Redirection
• SEO Schema Markup
• Why Choosing Rank Math for WordPress SEO?
• Move from Yoast SEO to Rank Math
• Conclusions

You can find out information about the Rank Math SEO plugin from the official site, and download the plugin:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/seo-by-rank-math/
https://rankmath.com/

You must first install WordPress.

The straightforward way is to log in to your WordPress admin area. Download, install and activate the Rank Math plugin from within WordPress.

Select Plugins (from the left side menu), and click Add New.

On the Plugins page, enter Rank Math into the keyword search box.

When the Rank Math SEO plugin appears in the keyword search results, click Install Now, and then click Activate.

Once the Rank Math SEO plugin is activated, you will be taken to the Connect Free Account page in your WordPress admin area.

You will have to connect WordPress and Rank Math.

Click Connect Your Account.

You may choose to log in to the Rank Math account, or register a new account.

If you choose to log in right away with your Facebook account, Gmail account, or WordPress.com account.

Click OK to agree to activate the Rank Math plugin on your WordPress site.

During the Rank Math setup process, the plugin offers 3 modes:

• Easy
• Advanced
• Custom Mode

Easy

• The Easy mode is suitable for websites where you only want to change the basics.
• Most of the settings remain are set to default as per industry best practices.
• You can configure it once immediately after the installation and activation of the Rank Math plugin, and then leave it.

Advanced

• The Advanced mode is for webmasters and/or website owners who want to control every SEO aspect of the site.
• You are offered options to change any settings.
• This mode enables you to have full control over your website’s search engine optimization.

Custom Mode

• The Custom mode is available only with Rank Math Pro (i.e. the paid version plugin).

In this Rank Math tutorial, we will use Advanced.

Select Advanced, and click Start Wizard.

Rank Math Setup Process in 6 Steps

Rank Math’s setup consists of 6 steps:

• Getting Started
• Your Site
• Search Console
• Sitemaps
• Optimization
• Ready

Select Type of Website

You must select a website type. Rank Math allows the following website types for selection:

• Personal Blog
• Community Blog / News Site
• Small Business Site
• Webshop
• Other Personal Website
• Other Business Website

For example, you can select Small Business Website.

If your choice is Small Business Website, then you will have to:

• Select Business Type.
• Enter Company Name.

Upload Logo

Upload a logo to your website.

Rank Math recommends uploading a logo between sizes 160x90px (smallest), or 1920x1080px (largest).

Use a photo/image in square shape, and this will be the best fit for Google.

Upload Social Media Image

Upload another photo, only for the use of social media.

This second image/photo will be the default thumbnail, when you share your web page in social media sites/platforms.

Click the Save and Continue button.

You can link Rank Math to your Google Search Console account.

Before linking, make sure your website has already been verified in your Google Search Console account.

This Google Search Console tutorial has explained the verification options in details.

You must get an authorization code from Google Search Console.

Click the Get Authorization Code button, and follow the instructions to retrieve the authorization code from Google Search Console.

You will add this authorization code to the Rank Math plugin in the WordPress admin area.

If you are managing multiple websites in your Google Search Console account, you must select the correct website URL or domain.

When you have successfully linked Rank Math and Google Search Console, the interface of Rank Math in WordPress will display your website’s Google Search Console data including crawl error notifications, impressions and/or clicks of queries, etc.

You can configure a sitemap with Rank Math. Toggle to enable Sitemaps.

Include Images

This option (when enabled), includes reference to images from the post content in sitemaps. This may help Google and/or other search engines index your images more efficiently.

Public Post Types

This option lets you select which page types to enable SEO options and to be included in your sitemap. The page types in the options are:

• Posts
• Pages

Public Taxonomies

This option lets you select taxonomies to enable SEO options and to be included in your sitemap.

Save the Changes

After making all your selections, click the Save and Continue button.

Under SEO Tweats, you can automate some of your SEO tasks.

For each SEO tweat, you have options between Enable or Disable.

Noindex Empty Category and Tag Archives

On your WordPress site, you may have previously created some blog post categories that have no existing or no published blog post. WordPress automatically creates category page URLs.

This SEO tweak adds noindex to these category pages. This prevents the indexation of category pages of very thin content and dilution of Google PageRank of your website.

As soon as a new post is published for the category, the category page is updated to index.

Nofollow External Links

This option when enabled, automatically adds rel=”nofollow” attribute to external links appearing in your posts, pages, and other post types.

Open External Links in New Tab/window

When this option is enabled, Rank Math automatically adds a target=”_blank” attribute to all the external links appearing in your posts, pages, and other post types.

Save the Changes

After making all the required selections, click the Save and Continue button.

You have completed the main part of Rank Math plugin setup in your WordPress site.

Click Advanced Setup Options. You will see the 3 setup steps under Advanced Options.

• Role Manager
• 404 and Redirection
• SEO Schema Markup

Continue with the setup.

As an administraot of your WordPress website, you can assign different roles to each user who have access to the admin area of your WordPress site.

The roles include:

• Administrator
• Editor
• Author
• Contributor
• Subscriber

You can assign each role with one of the access levels:

• Edit
• View

You can further assign each role with the section in WordPress they can have access:

• Titles & Meta Settings
• General Settings
• Sitemap Settings
• 404 Monitor Log
• Link Builder
• Redirections
• Role Manager
• Search Console
• Site-Wide Analysis
• On-Page Analysis
• On-Page General Settings
• On-Page Advanced Settings
• On-Page Schema Settings
• On-Page Social Settings
• Top Admin Bar

The option enables you to monitor web pages on your site that return 404 error (i.e. dead links). You can fix the 404 error issues based on the reports.

You may have old web page URLs on your site that are no longer in use, and you may have replaced them with new web pages. You can set up 301 redirect rules to have the old page URLs redirected to the new page URLs.

After setting up SEO schema markup, your web pages will contain useful metadata in the HTML codes.

Google may use the metadata to determine if some of your web page content will get a boost in the organic search ranking.

Structured Data Support

Rank Math can support different content types with Rich Snippets.

The schemas that can be included in the structured data of your web pages:

• Article
• Book
• Course
• Event
• Job Posting
• Local Business
• Music
• Person
• Product
• Recipe
• Restaurant
• Review
• Service
• Software/App
• Video

Handling of 404 Error Pages and 301 Redirects

Often your WordPress site may have dead links that return 404 status (or cause 404 error). This gives a signal to Google that the web pages are of low quality.

To fix this issue, you can configure the dead link URL to 301 redirect to the new web page URL.

With Rank Math, you can monitor the potential dead links, and then configure to handle 404 error pages, and 301 page directs.

Migrating On-page SEO Data from Other SEO Plugins

Many WordPress sites may be already using other SEO plugins, such as Yoast SEO.

Rank Math makes it very simple to migrate from Yoast SEO and/or other SEO plugins.

During Rank Math’s setup process, it offers the option to import all the on-page SEO data from Yoast SEO to Rank Math.

Yoast SEO is another popular SEO plugin for WordPress sites.

If you have been using Yoast SEO plugin on your WordPress website, you must have already implemented on-page SEO including page title, meta description, etc.

When switching from Yoast SEO to Rank Math plugin, you also want all your on-page SEO implementation to move across to Rank Math. This enables you:

• Not having to rewrite all your page titles and meta descriptions.
• Not risking to lose any on-page optimization that you have previously implemented.

But what is the best way to migrate to Rank Math from Yoast SEO?

I’ve written a Chinese version of this Rank Math tutorial.

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