How to Set up Rank Math SEO Plugin for the best results

SEO is a crucial part of any website to gain organic traffic. All the content available on your website must be search engine friendly so that the search engine can understand and rank the content for the user’s query. But there should be a tool that enables the SEO features in our website and track the SEO friendliness of the content we’re writing on our website. For the WordPress website, the Rank Math SEO plugin will do all this. This tutorial article will discuss how to set up the Rank Math SEO Plugin properly for the best results.

Search Optimized pages are beneficial for a search engine to crawl, analyze, and index. The content must contain valuable information and should be adequately optimized for search engines. Learn how to write SEO-friendly content for your website. But there should be a tool available to you to track the SEO score for your website. The Rank Math SEO plugin may be the right choice for you.

For this, first of all, you’ve to install the Rank Math SEO plugin to the WordPress website. If you don’t know how to do it, learn how to install a WordPress plugin.

How to set up Rank Math SEO plugin 2021

Rank math is a trending Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plugin for a WordPress website. This is all because of the plugin’s features and a good user interface. The Rank Math SEO plugin features are meta tag, schema markup structure data, URL redirect, 404 monitors, etc. You can go through Rank Math SEO plugin features.

After installing and activating the Rank Math SEO plugin, a setup wizard will open up, or you can access it in the plugin’s dashboard.

Rank math SEO Set up Wizard.

This enables you to access the advanced setup for the Rank Math SEO plugin.

Go to the Rank Math SEO plugin dashboard and select the setup wizard option as displayed above.

Now you’ll get two options, one for easy setup and the other for advanced setup. This will set up the website’s

• Select Advanced Set up for Rank Math SEO plugin settings
• Click on Start Wizard

Site Settings

In option 1, you can select a personal blog if it is a personal blog. You can find a suitable one. If you cannot find one and your website contains information that targets a large audience, you can select a small business site. In the second option, you can choose your website’s category. If not listed, select Organization.

1. Select your website kind, from the options provided,
   • Personal Blog
   • Community Blog/ News Site
   • Personal Portfolio
   • Small Business Site
   • Webshop
   • Other personal Website
   • Other Business Website
2. Select the type of Organization the website belongs to; if you’re unable to find a suitable one, select the generic Organization.
3. Select the name of the company, or your Organization
4. Select a logo that will be visible to Google Search Engine.
5. Select a logo that to be displayed on social media share.
6. Click on Save and continue.

Set up Google Services

Now you’ve to set up Google services, which means connecting your website or blog to the SEO plugin for analytics and search console details.

• Click on Connect Your Rank Math Account
• Save and Continue. Now you’ve to create a rank math account and login.

Rank Math SEO login page for Google Services.

Now you’ll be on the successful login page. Click on the OK button provided. After this, you’ll be redirected to Google Account Permissions Pages.

Select the Google account that contains Analytics and Search Console for your website or blog.

On the Google Services Permission page, grant permission to the Rank Math SEO plugin.

Rank Math SEO plugin will fetch analytics details from the Google Account, select:

1. Your Website or Blog URL
2. Account of Google Analytics
3. Property of Google Analytics
4. The data to be accessible for your website.
5. This will install the Google Analytics Code. You can enable it as per your need. (This load js in the header that may be render-blocking).
6. Save the settings.

Set up Rank Math SEO Sitemap

A sitemap is the mapping of your website or blog. Learn here about sitemap. Rank Math provides you the option to enable the sitemap for posts and pages. And also, you can enable a sitemap for categories.

1. Enable the sitemap for your website or blog.
2. Include the images in the sitemap of your website.
3. This will Include all posts to the sitemap.
4. This will Include all Pages to the sitemap.
5. Include the category. We recommend not to select this option. If you can properly interlink your content. Check it if you don’t have the blog section on your website.

SEO Tweaks

This will allow handling external links, noindex empty section of the blog.

1. Noindex empty section
2. All link should not be nofollow, as Google recommends give credit who deserve. You can read this article on external link SEO.
3. Enable this option so that users can stick with your website.

Now you successfully set up the Rank Math SEO plugin. From this point, we’ll start the advanced option.

If your website is single user website, then you can disable this option. And if not, you can choose the permissions for all those.

1. Enable Role Manager.
2. Save and Continue the settings

Monitor all Error Pages.

1. 404 Monitor- Enable this option to track all not found pages.
2. Monitor all redirection.

Schema data plays an essential role in SEO. You can read about schema markup data and SEO. The default schema data for the page is Article, but this will cause JSON-LD errors in all pages. To avoid this, we’ll select the none option for schema markup. This will generate a webpage type schema markup for pages.

1. Enable the Schema Markup Data
2. Schema Type for Posts.
3. Select Article Type.
4. Schema Type for Pages should be none.
5. Save and Continue

Dashboard Settings

Rank Math dashboard provides easy access to all its 17 settings. Let’s understand all about these settings one by one.

1. 404 Monitor: This will monitor all the not found pages of the website.
2. The ACF plugin to use this module.
3. Install AMP plugin to make Rank Math work with Accelerated Mobile Pages. Rank math will generate Schema markup structure data for AMP pages.
4. Analytics: This option allows you to connect the Rank Math to Google Analytics. You can also insert analytics code to the website with the help of this tool.
5. To add proper Meta tags to your bbPress forum posts.
6. Enable the BuddyPress module for Rank Math SEO.
7. Advance SEO for Images: If you forget to add title and alt text to images. The plugin will do that for you.
8. Instant indexing for Bing: With the help of API, Rank Math submits the post to the Bing webmaster tool.
9. Link Counter: Counts the total number of internal, external links; to and from links inside your posts.
10. Local SEO: Enable this option only if your website is for local businesses. If you’re writing a blog that reaches to be global, turn this off.
11. Redirections: for content that is modified and replaced with new URLs or for deleted content.
12. The Schema for structure data, already done in the setup.
13. Role manager for SEO. If your website has multiple authors, you can enable this feature and define roles for that.
14. SEO analytics: Analyze the complete website for you.
15. Sitemap: This will generate the XML sitemap for your website or blog. You can access the index sitemap at https://www.example.com/sitemap_index.xml. That will contain all the sitemaps available on the website.
16. You can enable it for Google Web Stories.
17. You can enable it if you’re running a WooCommerce website.

Sitemap General Settings.

1. Number of Links on one page of the sitemap.
2. Images of posts/pages in the sitemap.
3. You can enable this option as per your need.
4. Post that should not be index by the search engine.
5. The items that should noindex
6. Ping the search engine for new posts or updates.
7. Save the Changes

Misc Pages Setting.

Misc pages include the archive kind of section. The archive section usually creates a duplicate content issue, so you may consider disabling it.

All misc pages for a blog should be noindex. It would be best if you considered interlinking all pages while writing the posts.

1. Date archive. You can disable it to avoid duplicate content.
2. 404 Title pages name
3. Search Search Title
4. Search Results should be marked as noindex.
5. Noindex pagination. You can turn this off or index it only if you’re created a blog page separately.
6. Archive subpages should also be noindex.
7. Noindex password-protected pages.

Category and Tags index settings set up Rank Math SEO.

It would be best if you considered noindex the category and tags to avoid duplicate content. If you frequently update your blog and the blog contain a separate blog page, you can index pagination but not tags or categories.

This was the tutorial for a Rank Math SEO plugin into a WordPress website. If you have any issues, feel free to ask in the comment section below.