Today we will learn how to adjust the settings of the Rank Math plugin to help you optimize and optimize your site for SEO requirements.
Whereas, SEO is a priority for website owners of all kinds.
It is one of the “if not the most important” areas right now for any WordPress site.
Because of the great importance of this field, there are many add-ons and tools that help you achieve the best results, and this abundance will cause you to be confused in choosing between them.
So today we are here to help you learn about one of the best SEO plugins for WordPress, Rank Math.
In this article, we will learn how to install and activate this important add-on in order to take advantage of its many powerful features on your site.
Table of Contents
How to Install Rank Math plugin
Like any other WordPress plugin, Rank Math can be installed by entering your site control panel, then going to “Add New” from the “plugin” section.
Then type the name of the plugin, Rank Math, in the search box, and the addition will appear in the search results.
Now click on the install button, and after the installation is finished, click on the activate button.
After installing the Plugin, the Setup Wizard will appear directly automatically to help you adjust the Plugin settings with the option to cancel it.
But we will not cancel it because of its great importance in preparing the addition in the best way.
So if you canceled it when installing the extension on your site, you can restart it by heading to “Rank Math”, then “Dashboard”, and going to the “Setup Wizard” tab.
The setup wizard will take you through the following stages in order.
“Getting started” setup wizard
You will now be presented with three options representing the setup wizard’s settings:
- Easy
- Advanced
- Custom Mode
Since the Advanced mode is not different from the Easy mode except in some additional settings, we will proceed with the explanation based on the Advanced mode.
Note that you can change the mode at any moment through the setup wizard stages.
As for the Custom Mode, it is intended to import previous Rank Math settings by downloading them from your computer, which are often in txt or json format.
You will also notice that the extension performs a “Compatibility Check” test to make sure that there is nothing obstructing the work of the extension to the fullest.
The result of the test may be either full agreement, agreement with caveats, or incompatibility and problems to be resolved.
After solving the problems, if any, click on the “Start Wizard” button.
Import
In this step, you can import settings from other plugins related to the same field of work as Rank Math so you don’t lose any previous data.
Click on the “Continue” button to start the process.
You can skip this step, as you can always import the settings again by going to “Rank Math” then “Status & Tools” then “Import & Export” then “Other Plugins”.
Your site
At this point, you will be asked to enter information about your site type, so that Rank Math can add “Meta Data” that enables Google to understand what your site has to offer.
All options fall into two basic types:
1. personal Blog:
Such as a personal blog, a personal business gallery, or another personal website..
2. Business website:
Such as a community blog, news site, small business site, online store, or other business sites..
Depending on the type of site you choose, other fields will appear asking you for additional data about your site.
When you choose one of the options for a business site, for example, you will be asked to enter company details, and the “Logo” logo in order to display it in Google.
You will also be asked to enter a default image that appears when you post links from your site to social media.
Then click on the “Save and Continue” button.
Analytics
Because measurement is the key to development, Rank Math helps you learn the most important data and analytics offered by Google services such as Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and Google AdSense.
We have already prepared an article on how to connect Google Analytics with WordPress with step-by-step steps that allow you to take advantage of the treasure of data that Google Analytics offers you, and associate it with Rank Math plugin.
Rank Math enables you to display critical data from various platforms in one place for use in finding out the strengths and weaknesses of your site and developing it.
Rank Math has dedicated an entire article explaining the steps for connecting with each service in detail. You can view it here.
Sitemap
The sitemap helps Google to discover the content on your site, whether it is old or new, in addition to facilitating its archiving so that it appears in the search results.
A sitemap consists of a small file that contains a list of all the content on your site.
Through this step, Rank Math will allow you to create your sitemap without having to install any other plugins and automatically.
You can also choose to either include your site images in the sitemap or not, depending on your preference.
We recommend that you choose to include it unless you have thousands of images on your site as it will affect archiving.
You can also choose which types and categories of articles you want to include in your site map, where you will see all types and categories, even those that are usually found within online stores.
You can also create a custom sitemap in order for your site to appear in Google News or Google News, which helps you get more organic traffic.
And the last option in this section is the “Video Sitemap” option, which allows you to create a custom sitemap in order for your site’s videos to appear within the videos section of Google search.
After selecting your options, click on the “Save and Continue” button to move to the next step.
Optimization
In this section there are options for optimizing your site’s SEO to the best possible result.
These options are:
First, the option not to archive categories and tags, “Noindex Empty Category and Tag Archives”, which we recommend activating to facilitate archiving your site away from those categories and tags that you created and did not use.
Second, the option not to follow the “Nofollow External Links” links, which allows you to put all the links on your site in the form of Nofollow automatically without having to do it manually.
Third, the “Open External Links in New Tab/Window” option, which leads to opening any external link on your site in a new tab, allowing the user to remain on your site open and continue browsing, which is what you want, of course.
After selecting your options, click on the “Save and Continue” button to move to the next step.
Work has begun “Ready”
Obviously, this is the last step in the setup wizard for adding Rank Math.
There are no new settings to configure here, but you can enable “Enable auto update of the plugin” so that the plugin will automatically update itself to the latest version automatically.
If you have started the setup wizard in Advanced mode as we did here, you will notice that there is a “Setup Advanced Options” button that will take you to other additional advanced settings.
If you did not start the setup wizard in Advanced mode, you can restart the setup wizard again as we explained earlier and choose Advanced mode.
Now let’s move on to the advanced options.
1. Role Manager
This option allows you to define the tasks and permissions for each of the tiers available to your WordPress dashboard accounts.
The members’ ranks in WordPress, starting with the rank with the least privileged owner, are:
- Subscriber
- Contributor
- Author
- Editor
- Administrator
- Super Admin
After selecting your options, click on the “Save and Continue” button to move to the next step.
2. Inspector of non-existent pages
Enabling the “404 Monitor” option aims to notify you of pages that users are looking for on your site but that do not exist, which leads to the well-known 404 error.
The “Redirections” option allows users to be redirected to your site again automatically.
You can set which page you want to direct users to, as Rank Math has provided a complete guide for that .
Do not forget to click on the “Save and Continue” button to move to the next step.
3. Schema Markup
In this section, you can easily create a Schema chart or structured data.
If you don’t know what a schema is, it is simply an organized way to show search engines the description of the contents of a page of any website.
For example, if you write an article about a modern phone, the search engine will understand that the article is about this phone, but it will not understand if you are talking about the phone, reviewing it, or selling it.
All he will understand is that the article is about the phone only, and here comes the role of the Schema scheme, which tells search engines the exact contents and purpose of the article.
Schema is one of the important things in optimizing your site within the search results and raising its SEO.
You will also notice that there are some settings for the Schema chart that Rank Math makes available to you, and to see how to configure them you can visit this article from Rank Math itself.
Now we’re done with the last step of getting the Rank Math setup wizard ready to optimize your website for search engines.
By clicking on the “Save and Continue” button, you will return to the WordPress dashboard.
And with that, we have come to the end of our article today, in which we explained how to configure Rank Math plugin settings in detail for a powerful WordPress site that can compete with the first results on the search pages.
