A little over a year ago, the launch of a specific WordPress plugin called Math Rank. Little by little it has been revolutionizing the SEO community, becoming a true benchmark and already having more than 200,000 active installations.
In this post we want to share with you an exhaustive analysis on how to get the most out of the tool. We will review its initial configuration, as well as the different functionalities that it provides us for the WordPress SEO optimization.
Rank Math is here to stay!
What is Rank Math and what is it used for?
It is a plugin that allows us to perform many optimizations On-page SEO for WordPress. Currently, we can find as its main competitor, the already consecrated Yoast SEO. At this point, we wonder if Rank Math can represent a threat in the long term. The reality is that it has a wide range of functionalities, all of them for free, which makes it a very powerful tool.
Installation and configuration of the tool
Its installation is very simple. You can access from dashboard of your WordPress from the section called “plugins”, clicking on “Add new”. Next, we must search for the specific plugin: Rank Math. We will continue to click on “Activate” and then on “Install Now”.
The next step will be complete a registration in the tool. In order to use the plugin, you need to create a free account on Rank Math. Once you have created the account by clicking on “Free Rank Math Account”, you must fill in the form data and click on “Activate Rank Math”.
Once we have registered, we will proceed to the initial configuration, thus establishing the bases of our website. Although later we will be able to modify these details from our WordPress panel, it is convenient to establish the main functions at first.
Compatibility of your website with Rank Math
The first thing we will find when starting the Setup Wizard, it will be information about whether or not your website is compatible with the plugin. Otherwise, we will not be able to work with it correctly. The data you will see will be the following:
- The PHP version
- The version of your WordPress
- The PHP DOM extension
- The SimpleXML PHP Extension
- The PHP GD Extension
- If there is any other plugin already installed that fulfills the same functions and may conflict with Rank Math
Import settings from other SEO plugins
Rank Math will allow us keep all settings implemented in the SEO plugin that we were using so far. This way, we won’t have to start from scratch.
In this section, you can select which settings you want to import and which ones you don’t. This process implies that when it detects the plugin you were working with previously, it can deactivate it so that there are no conflicts between them.
Features about your website
In this section Rank Math will ask us for three pieces of information about our website, which we will have to add:
- Category: It refers to the type of project that your website is. A personal blog, a company website, an online store…
- Logo of your brand or company so that it can be displayed on Google.
- social imagewill refer to the one you want to be displayed when your brand is shared on social networks.
Connect with Search Console
The next step will be Link to your Search Console account. Clicking on “Get Authorization Code”, we will choose our gmail account and then the property to link. Google will provide you with a verification code that you must paste and click on “Authorize”.
Sitemap configuration
Rank Math gives you the possibility to configure the map of your website, customizing it according to your preferences. In this section, you will be allowed to activate or deactivate your sitemap, as well as choose the types of elements that you want to be included: if you want to include images, posts, pages, categories or types of categorization.
optimizations
This section will allow you optimize various issues related to your website. Among them, we can choose whether or not we want category pages and empty tags to be indexed, add the tag «NoFollow» to prevent Google from following links set in images, automatically add the tag «NoFollow» in links that point to external web pages, that these external links open in new windows or, for example, activate or not the categories in a URL.
Advanced configuration
As for other types of more advanced configurations, we can highlight the 404 error monitor and redirect manager. The first of them, if it is activated, will allow us to be informed of the 404 errors that search engine robots or the user himself finds on our website when browsing it. In the case of redirections, we can carry out two types of redirections, temporary and permanent, through a very intuitive interface.
Other aspects to highlight will be Miscellany. In this section, we can activate the option to add the alt attributes that are missing in the images of our website, as well as the attribute Title. In addition, in the option of “Enriched Snippet” we can tell the plugin to use structured data to mark up the content of your website.
What are its main features and functionalities?
modules
In the dashboard of Rank Math, we will find a series of modules that we can activate or deactivate according to the functionalities that we want to use.
- 404 Display
- MPA
- Link Counter
- Local SEO
- Redirections
- Rich Snippets
- RoleManager
- sitemap
- WooCommerce
Some of them have already been commented on previously, so we will delve into the functionalities not yet commented on:
- MPA: With this option you can choose if you want Rank Math to work with AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). In order to work correctly with this functionality, you must install the plugin “AMP Plugins”.
- Link Counter: It is an option to visualize the total number of internal and external links that arrive towards your post or leave them.
- Local SEO: In the event that the business acts mainly at the local level, it will be advisable to activate this module. In this way, Google will display it in such a way in the search results.
- RoleManager: This option will allow you to assign different permissions to users who have access to your WordPress.
- WooCommerce: If your website is an e-commerce and you have the WooCommerce plugin, you must activate this option.
General adjustments
In this section you will find a multitude of SEO parameters that you must configure for your website:
- Links: If you have completed the initial configuration wizard, you will find some sections already modified previously. Within this section, we will be able to perform actions such as redirect attachments, redirect orphaned media, remove stop words for permalinks, include «NoFollow» on external domains or, if applicable, exclude certain domains from the label «NoFollow«.
- Images: In this section, we can configure that both the alt attributes of the images and the titles are filled in automatically, an aspect commented on in the configuration wizard.
- Breadcrumbs: It gives us the option of whether or not we want breadcrumbs to be generated on our website.
- Webmaster Tools: In this section we can link Rank Math with the different search engines.
- Robots.txt: It will allow us to modify our robots.txt file very easily and without leaving WordPress.
- htaccess: From this section, we can also edit our .htaccess file
- Monitor 404: As we have seen before, the tool will collect those URLs, where both search engine robots and users detect a 404 error.
- Redirects: We previously anticipated how Rank Math would allow us to perform redirects through a simple interface.
- SearchConsole: If you haven’t already done so in your initial setup, you can link it to your Search Console account from here:
- Others: In this section you can configure whether or not you want Rank Math to track how you use the plugin, as well as some other settings about RSS.
Titles and meta
In this section we will configure everything that is relevant about the web page metadata. In addition, we must highlight how the tool allows us to carry out an exhaustive keyword optimization when our articles and pages can have greater visibility.
- Overall Goal: In this section we can establish what the values of the meta robots will be for the entire web page, or failing that, individually according to the type of content. In addition, you will have the possibility to choose how you want the titles of your URLs to be seen.
- Social Goal: In this section you can configure different types of settings depending on how you want the content to be shared on your social networks.
- Front page: This section will allow you to edit the title and description of that page that you have established as Home.
- Authors: You will be able to configure all author archives pages.
- Other pages: It gives you the opportunity to configure other types of pages, such as error pages or internal search results for example.
- File types: As we mentioned before, you have the possibility of individually configuring your website, depending on the type of content (pages, posts, media, categories and tags). It will also allow us to indicate if there is a canonical URL for said content.
Sitemap settings
In addition to the actions carried out through the personal assistant, in this section we can delve even further into how we want our website map to be. In this section, we can, for example, limit the number of links to store per sitemap.
SEO analysis
From this option, Rank Math will carry out an analysis of your website, establishing a punctuation over 100 about the health of it. It will provide us with a detailed report about the improvements and errors that have been detected, as well as some recommendations to be able to solve them.
It is important to point out that, although it is a basic analysis, it can help us to carry out a first audit of our website.
Now that you have learned how to take advantage of this tool, it is time to put everything you have learned into practice. We have no doubt that it can become a benchmark in the sector on a par with other plugins such as Yoast SEO.
Since We work at the forefront with all kinds of tools in the seo optimization of our clients. If what you are looking for is to position your web page in the organic results of Google, our includes everything you need to take your website to the top.
And what do you think about the features offered by Rank Math? Do you think that in the future you can…
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