Complete Rank Math SEO Tutorial 2021 (Step by step)

hey there my friends if you're watching this video i'm pretty sure you know what rank meth is it's a great alternative to yoast seo in case you don't know what rankmath does it basically helps you to optimize your website for major search engines if you want your content or articles to be ranked on search results you definitely need a plugin like rankmath so in this video i'm going to show you step by step on how to set up rank math on your website and if you are using yoast i will show you how to import your data from yoast to rank math i'm going to show you how to configure your site for optimal seo settings i'll show you how to optimize your home page for seo i will show you how to submit a sitemap to google search console connect rank math and your site to the latest version of google analytics talk about woocommerce seo advanced custom fields and many more so there are a lot to cover and before we get into the tutorial i hope you can do me a little favor and smash that thumbs up button it'll really help this channel out and help this video reach out to others who need this by the way my name is jack and i do a lot of wordpress and online business content i have an ever growing list of wordpress tutorials that is focused on site speed i've done quite a few side speed optimization case studies on live sites and i've done quite a bit on affiliate marketing so if any of these topics interest you feel free to subscribe to the channel and hit the bell notification and without further ado let's get right into the tutorial we'll start with installing rank math on a site that is currently using yoast seo let's go [Music] so here we go on the wordpress dashboard let's head over to plugins and select add new and on the search bar let's search for rank math here we are ranked math seo let's install this plugin and activate it and right after that you'll be brought to this page now if you already have a ranked math account maybe you have subscribed to rank math pro or you have used ranked math previously you definitely want to use the same account across the board especially if you have ranked math pro but if you don't want to connect an account or set up a new one you can select skip now but for my case since i have a pro account let's click on connect your account and you'll be prompted to either log in through facebook google or wordpress but i've signed up to rankmathpro through email so i'll select to use email and password if you don't have an account you can select register now to create a free account don't worry it is totally free but if you wish to upgrade to rank math pro i hope you can use this link the link is in the description as well but anyway let me log into my account and let's activate now and you'll be brought to the setup wizard now in case you missed any steps and you're not seeing this wizard let me show you where to look for it let me return to the dashboard and over at the rank math dashboard you will see this setup wizard click on that and we'll be brought back to the same page so don't worry if you're not seeing this page always well now if you're totally new and you don't want to worry about all the setting and stuff and you want rank math to take care of most of the settings you can select easy but for this tutorial because i want to show you all the settings available i will select events and let's click on start wizard now i'm currently using yoast seo as you can see and it really depends on what seo plugin you are using rank math will detect that we want to expand this to make sure that all the data is being imported and just like that when you start importing the data they will give you an indication of what is being imported so switching from yoast seo or other seo plugins is just that simple it is a click of a button and everything that was done previously with your seo plugin will be imported to rank math and once it is done it takes about less than a minute for my case we can continue with the setup and on the background your site is now optimized for seo with rankmath at this point you can already delete your previous seo plugin but let's continue with the setup i'll click on continue from here you can see rankmath has already drawn out some data that was previously set on yoast if this is your first time setting up ranked map without any previous seo plugins you may have to input all the details but for my case there is just one thing i need to amend which is this eco tarot is best suited as a community block you should select the one that is most suitable for your website and as for the business type i'll leave it as an organization but if you expand it out you will see a lot of different options and depending on what your business is about you can select it accordingly this will give you a different set of schema data type but if you are not exactly sure which to select it is best to leave it as organization because this will give you the broadest coverage of schema data if you want more specific schema data you can customize it on a specific page article or whatever so cool i do not need to add a logo because it was done in yoast and we are basically done for this step let's save and continue now this is the step where you connect to google services such as analytics and search console but this is a little complicated due to the fact that google analytics has changed and there are some configurations to do before it gets connected i will show you how to connect to google in a while but let us skip this step for now and we will reach the sitemap now if you have another sitemap plugin installed you can delete that now because rankmap will take care of that for you you just need to make sure that this is toggled on you want to include a sitemap for images as well and for the public post types we have posts pages products and elements if you are using a wordpress theme such as cadence generatepress bloxy or astra you may see something like elements it is what you use to hook elements to a page but i don't want to include them in a sitemap because i use elements for templates and some call to actions and it doesn't really add value to helping bots or humans navigate my website sitemap is all about the ease of navigating your website and then we have public taxonomies normally for blogs we'll see categories and if you have woocommerce installed you will see the product categories these are by default but if you have page builders in store and you have different post types and taxonomies you may see more options here it could be some design templates and stuff and again to know whether you should select that just think about if it will help bots or humans navigate your website better for example if you have a taxonomy for templates that wouldn't help anyway i will make sure to select these two and let's save and continue now seo tweaks if your category or tag is empty you definitely do not want them to be indexed this is a known seo practice now if you toggle this no follow external links on it basically means whatever links you place on your article that links to maybe the source of the data or links to some credible research by default they will be placed as no follow this is not a good seo practice you want to give credit where credit is due google and search engines likes that so you generally do not want to turn this on and as for opening external links in new tabs this is a common seo practice i'll leave this on and let's save and continue and we're done mostly done about 80 percent we are awesome already now let's go to the advanced options for the role manager by default wordpress has all these roles like the administrator which is usually going to be you if you are the site owner and all these are the functionalities of rank math you're basically assigning the accessibility of these functionalities to each row now administrators should be able to assess all these functions right and if you have a team of writers your editors should have access to maybe the link builder where your editor can access the link suggestions and you definitely want your editor to have access to the on-page advanced settings to control the kinetico url for seo purposes which happens to be these settings here as you can see you can control the kinetico url and other settings and maybe the analytics where she or he can look at the keyword data of your site and do research and maybe come up with topics that are trendy or relevant to what your site visitors are looking for or maybe improve on an article and i think that's the highest authority you should give to an editor it really depends on your comfort level if you trust your editor fully by all means give full access but generally i don't think you should do that and then as for the authors i think the default settings are good enough but again it is really up to you and here are the other rows which i think should not have any control over the functionalities we are basically done with this let's save and continue now 404 this is an important tool in case you change the url of the article or you have deleted an article they are bound to have internal links that are pointing to a page that does not exist anymore especially for older sites so having this 404 monitor it will prompt you to redirect the forward photo to another page of your site and that's why we need this and then because of the 404 we'll need the redirection manager to manage all the redirections let's save and continue now schema markup is probably the most fundamental in seo in simple terms it is a language that allows your website to tell search engines like google what your article is about let me give you an example if your website is for example a job posting site and every post you create is a job posting you want to select this job posting and if you add a new post which is a job posting you will have an area where you can input basic information like the basic salary date posted employment type etc and what it does is it tells google hey google this is a job posting can you give me a reach snippet on your search results like this or another example is if you're running a blog then the schema type for post should be article and you want to select blog posts it is basically telling google hey i have this blog post try and understand it and i hope you can give me a rich snippet like this so this is all about feeding the right information for google so they understand what your blog post or page is about and this is the general settings for posts and pages if you don't know which to choose just leave it as it is the default setting should give you the right schema markup for normal blocks let's save and continue and we will be brought back to the rank math dashboard as you can see these are all the functions that you have on the free version of rank math and depending on what you toggle on these features will appear in the settings for example if you click on the general settings take note that these are the available settings we have after going through the setup wizard and if we go back to the dashboard and we maybe toggle this image seo settings on let's go back to the general settings you will see this images tab here where you can configure all the settings for images before we toggle the image seo on there wasn't an images tab now let's go through each of these settings here for analytics i will leave this towards the end of the video let's start with the general settings and links strip category base for newer sites if this is not turned on i would recommend to just leave it as it is this is an irreversible action what it basically means is by default if your article is categorized under a certain category the url will look like this you have your domain name the category for which your article is categorized and then your article name if you toggle this on it will remove this category in between now if you turn this on and you suddenly decide to turn it back off you are going to have tons of 404s if you have hundreds or thousands of articles so if this is not turned on i'll leave it as it is but if it's already turned on on your site don't turn it off to my knowledge it doesn't matter if you turn it on or turn it off it has no impact on seo whatsoever now a lot of these options we have already touched based on them in the setup wizard so we're gonna leave them as it is as for the breadcrumbs it is essentially a trail of page links that leads to the page you are on for example something like this you're on this page but these are all the previous pages that will lead to this page it is generally a good seo practice to have it but a complicated part is some teams already have this functionality and if it's already turned on then on rank math you shouldn't turn it on to cause conflict and some teams are not compatible with breadcrumbs and turning this on it might break the site so i will not be talking about this if you really want to turn this on then make sure that you save a backup copy of your site before turning this on next let's go to the image seo we have just turned on i would recommend turning this on you know sometimes when we add an image to an article we forgot to add an alt text here and what it does is it tells google what your image is about have you ever used google to search for images having an alt text allows you to rank for keywords in the image search and it boosts general seo as well so all images should have an alt attribute if you forgot to add one rank math will take care of it for you if you toggle this on and as for the missing title attribute i think this is kind of redundant because nowadays when you add an image to your site it comes with a title next we have the webmaster tools this is a useful tool for you to connect your site to google search console and rankmath has made it easy for us we don't have to go through the dns method or adding codes to your hit tag if you don't know where to get this verification code of your search console just click on this copy this entire code go back to rank math and paste the entire code in and as you save this we are basically done now the only thing is to go back to the webmaster central and verify and we are done it's that simple you can go through the process for others as well if you want faster rankings of your article on these search engines i'll leave it up to you to go through the process now the robots.txt i'll recommend that you leave this as it is generally this will tell google crawlers whether they should or should not cross certain parts of your site messing with this might cause your ranking so don't do it as for others we don't really need to add anything to this i don't even know if anybody uses rss anymore on their sites we have social media channels like tik tok pinterest facebook instagram to get our daily feeds so it will be more effective if you post your articles on those channels rather than have them on your site generally rss is just a medium for you to notify your site visitors as something new has been published on your site it used to be very popular back in the day but nowadays i don't see anybody using rss anymore they usually go to social media sites to get updates so i'll rather you update your followers through social media channels or email marketing than rss feeds so we'll skip this we'll talk about woocommerce in a while now as for htss we will not make any changes to this because if you mess around with the codes it may break your website so i will not do anything to this let's go to 404 monitor again nothing much to adjust 404 monitor as i've mentioned it will notify you when you have pages that were previously indexed on search engines but those pages don't exist anymore so i'll not do anything to this let's go to redirections now redirection is usually used when you delete a page or change the permalink structure and for such cases we'll leave it as 301 permanent move now let me explain a little more about these options for 302 i recommend not to use it as it is vague if you need a temporary redirect where you still need the original url later on for example if you are building a page that is still under construction you will want to use 307 instead of 302 when the page is completed you will remove the 307. if ever your content is removed do not use 410 just use 301 instead because it is most recognizable and if ever you are unlucky that your content needs to be taken down by court order then you will need to use 451 let's hope we never use this so by default we'll keep it as 301 but if you visit the redirections tab and you edit any link you can amend the redirection type so we are basically done with the general settings now let's go to titles and meta as for the global meta we want the robot's meta to be indexed so all of our content and stuff will be indexed by search engines the advanced robots meta we want to keep it as it is negative one basically tells google that you can use all the content on the article to be used as a snippet or they can use all the content in the video as a preview so there are no restrictions however if you in fact change this number you are restricting google crawlers so generally we want to leave this as negative one this is done on the setup wizard and as for the separator character this is by preference just take a look at the symbol here as i change the separators you basically change the look of it on search results personally i like this and if you want to capitalize the first character of all title tags you can do so by toggling this on i choose to leave it to give me more flexibility and if you want to add a fallback image to be displayed on facebook in case you forgot to add a featured image you can do so here and this is self-explanatory alright let's go to local seo as you know these are the information we have done on the setup wizard but this is especially important for local businesses and there are more settings here if you toggle this on let's go back to the page and refresh and you'll see there are a lot more details you can add you can add your email address your business address your business type which was set in the setup wizard you can add the opening hours design on the time format your phone number price range set your about page contact page google maps if you don't know the api key just click on this link to get it and if you know the coordinates of your business location you can add it here so these are all the information you can give to google so that they can display something like this on their search results in case people are searching for your business they will know the opening hours and how to contact you these are important information for your customers so please don't neglect this for local businesses but for my case this is a blog so i won't be needing this let me toggle this off and let's hit refresh and all those settings are gone as for the social meta this is for you to connect your facebook and twitter you can add your facebook page url here for my case this is the facebook page i'll leave all this as it is but feel free to go through the links to get the user id the app id and the secret id all this will give you a very nice facebook post display instead of the ugly looking ones like this and then as for twitter you can add just the username and that's it i don't have a twitter account for this site so i'll leave it as it is now let's go to the home page essentially it is telling you to go to the settings and under reading they want you to define your home page and if you want to optimize this page for seo you need to go to that particular page for my case it is this home page let's edit this and you want to optimize this page for seo so currently on the search result it will look like this doesn't look really nice let's edit snippets and over here i don't really care if the title is showing so let me remove this and let me remove this as well and as for this separator let me cut this off and let me paste it here and then let me add something like the tagline so something like this now it'll look much better on search engine now this site name you can basically find it on the settings and general which is over here this code is actually drawing information from this view so if i change the site title this will change as well just take note of that and as for the description let me type something in so something like this let's close this off and then as for the focus keyword let's just optimize for the brand name you see over here it is recommending us to add echo tarot in the meta description so let's do that i've typed in some text so i'll place it here this is too long let us do something about this and done let us close this off and we see a little green tick here as for this let us do something like this and we are basically done we are all good let's update this and we have basically optimized the home page for seo now let's get back to the rank map dashboard and under titles and meta let's continue on with the authors now if your site only has one author which is yourself then you want to disable this but if your site has more than one writer you need to enable this and to avoid duplicate content you should put a note index on auto archives which rank mav has already done so by default now we have gone through all this and this is how it looks like on search results for the author archive you can leave it as it is or you can change it to something like articles written by the author name which is symbolized by this and you can change this to something like this articles written by author name of the site name and then we have the page which is this and that's basically it let's save changes and let's go to the miscellaneous pages this is where you customize the date archives the 404 page just like how you will customize the author archives this is how the 404 looks like it really depends on how you would want to display your photo for i'll leave all this as it is but you definitely want to toggle this on in case you have any paid content on the site you don't want those pages to be indexed on search engines you want to keep them private and then we're going to save changes now the post types i think the default settings from rankmath is good enough but if you want to further customize it for example if you want to add a current year so that if you go to google for example you have this 2021 in the seo title but if you take a look at this this is written in 2019 so you can basically display the current year in the search results and the reason bloggers do this is because it gives the impression that this article is current this is debatable i see some big sites doing this if you want to do this as well on a single post title you can add for example open and close brackets and within that let's search for current year this is the code let's cut this and paste this inside the bracket now the title is too long so let me bring this forward so you can see how it looks like so it's something like this but i want to put it right before the separator now if you do this all your posts will now have this current year on the search results but if you don't want to do that for all of your posts you should remove this and you'll do the manual customization here for example this so let's continue i'll leave all this as it is to give my articles more flexibility if i want to change the seo title and description i will go straight to the specific post and page to edit the snippet instead of doing them here now this schema type is done on the setup wizard and the rest are quite standard i'm sure you know what this is already and as for the custom fields we'll talk more about this in the woocommerce section because we'll be switching to another site as a reference now there are a lot of seo strategies to tackle this you have probably hear a lot of people talking about this and there is really no right or wrong answer the key is really to write the best content have the best headline that attracts the right audience and that's the general rule of time for seo now as for the pages it is going to be the same as well typically i wouldn't add the year to pages because usually they are static and as for the attachments we have basically set this in the seo wizard and for the elements i use elements as design templates so i do not want this to be indexed so that's basically the settings i will need and for the products they are basically the same all these are quite standard and we have discussed about customizing this now let's talk about categories i want to make sure that categories are not indexed because it might cause google to view it as duplicate content so if you do not have this turned on you want to do so and you want to select no index the same goes for text i want to put a no index to text and let's save changes and we are basically done with the titles and meta now let us add sitemaps sitemap is a guide for google robots to navigate through your site to easily find all the pages and posts and rankmath has created the sitemap for you and this is the link you need to copy this and then you need to go to google search console and you need to go to sitemaps and paste in the link you need to remove all this and let's submit and great it is successful search console will tell you if the status is successful and it will show you how many pages of posts they have indexed and there we go we are 95 done with the optimization the rest of the five percent comes from the customization of your single post articles and all these we have basically covered them earlier now let's talk about woocommerce and this acf now we are on my other side where i use it to do woocommerce tutorials you see i've created a single product template like this where all this information are drawn from these custom fields and these custom fields basically came from a plugin called advanced custom fields by delicious brains and i've created this view group where all these custom fields will be displayed on products under the knife category you'll see all these fields right here in the single product page it sounds complicated but it's actually quite simple if you are curious how i created this single product template you can watch this video at the top right corner i've left the link in the description as well so basically if you toggle this woocommerce feature on what it does is on the single product page as you scroll all the way to the bottom you will see this section where it says rank math seo and this is where you optimize this single product for search engines so for example the focus keyword will be the name of the knife and now we have a score of 54. now here's the interesting thing as you can see here content should be 600 words to 2500 words which means currently all this content that i've written over here in the custom fields are not taken into account and rank math so what we need to do is to go back to the rank map dashboard and over at this acf feature we need to turn this on and immediately after that if we go back to the single product page and we refresh now as we scroll down all the way to where the rank math is you will see now it has detected 74 words and these came from the custom fields and before we activated the acf feature rankmap did not pick up any content because the product description as well as the product shop description are basically left blank so that's all we need to know about acf and woocommerce in rankmath if you have activated the woocommerce feature you'll have this product post time here or you can customize the single product title and as you know the more customized this is the more restriction it's going to be on your individual products so it's really up to you whether you want to spend time customizing this i feel that time will be better spent if you optimize for seo on the product page itself rather than here but this is just for you to know you have all these options to customize for your product post type and the other settings that are available when you have activated the woocommerce feature as this product categories that work similar to the post categories and tags you can make the product categories no index and you can do the same with product tags and that's what you basically need to know and now there is one last thing we need to do which is to connect your website to google analytics now we are back on the eco tarot website and i've opened up my google analytics and now let us connect through the usual way by clicking on this button and let's select the google analytics account you want to check all these boxes and let's continue and now the thing is as you can see the analytics is not sync if they are in sync it will have a green dot here instead of red so if we go to the general settings and we select analytics we can see over here under the account we can select ecotaro and under the property we have no other options it's supposed to show the property here so how do we solve this this is a very common issue if you don't set up the property that allows universal data so let's go to admin and let's create a new property let us give this property a name as for me i live in singapore so i'll rather have the data served to me in my time zone currency i'll leave it as us dollars and you need to open this advanced options up and over here you can see universal analytics property let's toggle this on now over here you want to put in your website url and make sure you select this as well as checking this box and let's click next select an industry for me i'll select home and garden and the business size or select small but you can select whatever that suits your business and then i'll check whatever that applies to my business increase my conversion measure content monetization this as well as this now let's create the property and here we go we are done let's go back to our site and let's refresh this let us go back to analytics now let's select an account and we have the new property here let's select this and let's select all website data and let's save changes and once that's done you can see this little dot has turned green and that's what you need to do to connect to google analytics all you need is just the universal analytics data if you have an existing property create a new one it doesn't hurt now overall ranked math is a very powerful seo tool that will help your site optimize for major search engines it provides you with a ton of features that no other seo plugins provide and the best thing about this is that it is free now ranked math has a pro version that costs 59 per year and you can install it on unlimited websites and it offers you a lot more functionalities now if you decide to upgrade to the pro version i hope you can use this link i've left the link in the description as well and full disclaimer i do make a small commission if you use the link to make a purchase and don't worry it will not cost you anything more if you get ranked math pro directly from the site so your gesture will definitely support my channel and i thank you for that anyway i'll be doing a separate video for the pro version of rankmath where we'll discuss all the differences and possibilities of this plugin i hope this video has been helpful to you i've spent a lot of time researching and experimenting on the optimal settings for rank math and i hope to have earned a thumbs up from you if you have already done that thank you i really appreciate that and if you have any questions feel free to leave them down in the comments all the best to you take care and stay safe you

Channel: Jack Cao

Views: 4,481

Keywords: rank math seo plugin tutorial, rank math setup, rank math seo plugin, rank math tutorial, rank math, rank math seo plugin setup, rank math seo tutorial, rank math seo plugin review, rank math plugin, rank math review, rank math tutorial 2021, seo tutorial for beginners, rank math seo wordpress, complete rank math tutorial, rank math seo, seo plugin for wordpress, wordpress seo tutorial for beginners, best seo plugin for wordpress, rank math pro, rank math setup tutorial

Id: WRxjU5_x3hk

Length: 29min 39sec (1779 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 02 2021