Rank Math SEO Plugin Tutorial 2022 (Step-By-Step): Best Free SEO Plugin

what if i told you there was a wordpress seo plugin that would help you increase your traffic and rankings whether you are looking for more local or global traffic whether you have seo experience or not it has an seo analyzer that will go in and look at your website and tell you specifically what you should be doing to increase your rankings you will be able to implement google schema in just a few clicks you'll be able to optimize your post for your desired keywords and track those rankings it integrates with google search console which we've talked about here before it will run an seo audit and content on it and a whole lot more all will not even slowing down your website and the best part it's free that's right today we're going to be talking about the rank math seo plugin and we're going to be going through the entire plugin step by step so that you know exactly what to do and why you're doing what you're doing so that you see those results with more traffic and higher rankings now this is going to take some time to do but let me tell you exactly why you should dedicate this time now of course you want to do this so that you get those higher traffic and higher rankings right but on top of that if you do seo for more than just one site or you may in the future you're going to be able to export all of the settings that we create today and simply import them into the new website this means this is only a process you have to go through one time and then the rest of your attention can be on focusing on optimizing those new posts that you create so if that sounds good let's go ahead and just dive in and get started you can find the rank math seo plugin right in the wordpress plugin directory but what we're going to do is head on over to the website dashboard so that we can go ahead and install the plug-in now what i highly encourage you to do is go ahead and pull up your own site so that way you can install rank math and just go ahead and set it up as we go through this together so the first thing we're going to do is head on over to plugins and add new and up here in the search box we're going to put in rank map so we can find the plugin as it comes up we're going to simply click on install now and once the plugin has installed we will click activate so now the plugin is activated and you can see it appears here in the plugin list and you're also going to see it over here on the left hand navigation bar so we can open up rank math plugin here now you'll see here that it is prompting you to connect a free rank math account so as i share with you this is a free plugin and you don't have to set up a free account but i would encourage you to do so because it is going to give you additional keyword suggestions and it's going to give you more in-depth seo analysis so if you head on over to the rank math website you can simply set up a free account real quick and once you've done that you can come on back over to your dashboard to connect your account and it just confirms you have the right account you can click ok and now you're going to see this is where it's going to walk you through the setup wizard now they've made this really really easy for you and you have two options to start with you can either go with the easy setup process and this is if you are really not familiar with seo and you just want to change absolute basics here and let rank math go out and do its thing then you can select the easy one now advance is obviously more advanced and this is going to give you maximum control to be able to handle different aspects of seo on your website which is definitely what i would prefer to have now if you go through the advanced section like we're going to do here this is going to allow you to change more of the settings but if you ever decide wait this is too much for me i want to let rank math do its thing you'll be able to easily switch back to the easy setup version here so we will go ahead and start the wizard now it's going to take you through some additional prompts here so we're going to first start off by selecting the type of website here now depending on what you select here for instance if you select small business site it's going to pull up a drop down box here for you to go ahead and select the actual type of business you can go ahead and just start typing in your type of business and it's gonna pull up some suggestions here for you so we're gonna select personal blog here now you'll notice here that the business name is already here so it has gone ahead and pulled that in for you next up we can upload a logo for google now this is important for you to do even though this seems small because rank math is going to add code to your website so that the search engines know what your specific logo is and this is actually the logo that they'll use if your website appears in the knowledge graph alongside the google search results there so we'll go ahead and upload that image if you do have a square version of your logo that is recommended but if not that's okay too and we'll go ahead and select that file and next up you can upload your default social share image so if the case where you have a webpage that is shared on social media anywhere and the thumbnail is not being used or it doesn't populate this is going to be the default image that shows up so it actually looks nice when someone sees the link on social media so we're going to go ahead and upload that image there as well and now that those have been uploaded we are on to the next step now as you hopefully know connect now as you hopefully know using google search console and google analytics all these free accounts that google gives you it's going to give you a lot of insight so anytime you can connect your seo work with those you want to do it if you're not familiar with google search console definitely check out my tutorial on that but what we're going to do is go ahead and connect google services right here we are going to grant permission and we'll scroll down and click on allow so now it is pulling in the information for our site for google search console so that is done here moving on to analytics here we can select the correct account we can select the right property in a view it doesn't look like a separate one has been set up here but if we go ahead and change that and we add it in here we can always come back to the prompts here and update this if the analytics code is installed you don't need to do that and if you would like to connect adsense that is part of their pro program so we will go ahead and skip that for now and on to the next so we're getting to the halfway point of the setup wizard here and we're going to look at site maps now in case you're not familiar with a site map these sitemaps help search engines quickly find the pages and the posts that are on your website and what rank math has here is just a built-in google compliant sitemap generator that's going to create that site map automatically for you so you don't have to go to another plug-in or website worry about uploading it for you so if you're using another sitemap plug-in it's probably best just to go ahead and turn that off deactivate that from your website so it's not slowing you down since you already have the feature here and enable that if you do want to disable it though you simply do that by clicking that box right here now for the images here this is going to allow you to choose if you want to include images in your sitemap and typically you do want to include those images and just leave that enabled however if you have a site that has thousands of images then you probably want to turn that off so that really depends on the type of site that you have now here we have a public post type section and this way you're going to be able to decide which of the post types are actually going to be included in the sitemap here so we want to include the pages and the posts so we do not need these couples so we'll go ahead and take those off here now under public taxonomies this is going to let you include which of those are going to be included in your site map as well and we'll go ahead and just leave it as the categories and we're already on to the second to last step which is optimization now these are some simple seo settings here but they definitely make a difference so we want to pay attention to these the first we're going to look at is the no index empty category and tag archives so this is for websites that have a lot of categories and tags and if you have too many of those and you don't actually end up using those those archived pages can be indexed by search engines which is okay for that to happen but the problem is for the categories and the tags where there aren't actually any content there's no post no pages that actually belong to those it's a big waste of your crawl budget and that's not something that you want to waste we want google to be focusing in on the categories it pages the post that you actually want to show up in search engines so this is why we enable this section here so they don't index any of those empty categories or the tag archives now the no follow external links section here you're able to enable this in order to automatically set external links to no follow now for pages or posts where you're creating a lot of external links it's good to go ahead and put the no follow tag there however that can take a lot of time or you could forget to do that so this sets it as nofollow by default and later we'll look at where you can actually whitelist some specific domains and you can actually change the settings on each of the posts that you're at so you won't be locked into this for every link that you add now next up we have the open external links in a new tab or window which is a feature that i love definitely want this enabled so that way anytime you have a link to an external website it is automatically going to open that website in a new tab for the visitor which is really really good because you don't want your visitors leaving your site but they tend to leave your site if you don't open any external links in a new window and it just simply replaces your web page in the same window so that's why we want to enable that as well all right let's go on and the site is ready so we are ready to go ahead and optimize the post so you'll see a few things here if you do want to auto enable the update of this plugin you can do this here otherwise you can just do that as part of your regular site maintenance here you will find links to support and any errors or they're knowledge based as this is very well documented now you will notice in the bottom right hand corner here we have a blue button for setting up the advanced options so since we selected advance we're going to go ahead and do just that so we're starting off here in the role manager now the purpose of this is if you have multiple people who have access to your website for different reasons you want to be able to control who can see what and who can do what when it comes to rank math and that's exactly what you're going to be able to do in role manager so first up here you will see that an administrator can do everything within rank math and you'll be able to see an editor can do some things but others they will not have access to so they won't be able to help you there but this way if you want to give somebody access and you won't only want to give them access to one specific thing then you'll be able to do that we have authors we have contributors and subscribers who are not able to do anything so that's what you can go through and you can look at what you would want each person to have access to if this is not something that's a concern to you you can skip this step otherwise go ahead and select the ones that you want for each roll and click save and continue now nothing is more frustrating than a 404 error page and that's what this is going to help you avoid so we want to enable the 404 monitor this is going to show you if any of your site visitors end up seeing a 404 error so that you can make sure you take care of it the second part here is redirections this is going to let us set up read directions so especially when we are looking at any 404 errors that pop up on our site we're going to be able to take those urls that site visitors are somehow finding and redirect them to a page we would rather them see all right let's move on to the last one which is schema markup now i'm not going to go too far into what schema is if this isn't something that you are familiar with but just to give you a quick context here schema is going to help search engines better understand what your page is actually about and it can also impact what your search result looks like in search engines so this is definitely something to pay attention to and while this can feel very complex for a lot of people this really helps make it very very simple for you so we want to go ahead and enable this here and we can select the schema for the different types of posts that we have so as you can see there's articles books courses events job postings recipes videos and so on so we're going to go ahead and just leave it as articles here now under article type we have either article blog post or news article so that way google knows what to do with this type of post so obviously if you select a different one you're gonna have some different options down here so we're gonna leave this as blog post and the schema type for pages we will leave that set to articles as well now this is specific to thrive themes which is what the site is built on but again if you're using other site builders you may see some options for those here as well and we will simply click save and continue now if you end up on this page good news you have successfully installed and set up the rank math seo plugin and now we get to have a lot more fun because we're going to get into the different sections here and how you're going to be able to use this for more traffic so let's do it now that we're on this page i want to point out a few things to you google services is still being connected up here so it'll tell you once that has been done and here's where we're going to be able to access everything that we can set up and get all this juicy information that will help us with our seo now i did mention in the setup wizard that you'll be able to select between easy and advanced so right there is where you can go and change if you don't want to do the advanced settings anymore and you ever want to go back to easy that's where you can do it right there now you want to pop over to import and export for a couple of things one is if you want to set up rank math and you have multiple websites whether these are client websites or websites that you own and you set up everything and rather than going through the setup process for all of the sites what you can do is you can export your settings and import them into the new site once you have rank math installed there so that is super easy and helpful now what you can also do is let's say you have been using another seo plugin and you decide well i'm switching over to rank math the other seo plugin is going to show up here and you're going to be able to take the information from that to use within rank math so you don't again have to reset up everything and lastly you can take a backup of your settings so if anything happens in the future you need to restore them then you will have a backup there so that's all good to know but we're gonna head on back over here to the modules now there's some other settings that will go through but let's do something a little more exciting first which is let's go ahead and run the seo analysis so we can see how the website is performing and start getting some basic recommendations now we can either access this analysis through the navigation here under rank math seo analysis or you'll also find that as a module down here seo analysis and we can click on settings now this is going to analyze some of the basic seo settings but these settings really make a big difference and that's why we need to make sure they're done and so this really just gives us some automated reports so we have something to start with here so we are going to click on start site wide analysis and we're going to let that run and now you'll see we have an seo score so this is performing as a 81 we have out of 30 tests that have ran at 23 have been passed one has a warning and six have failed so we know we definitely have some work to do but we're not doing too bad so in terms of the score the higher the number the better and the color is also going to let you know how that is as well now in terms of the test here if it has passed it means there's nothing for you to fix obviously failed means this is something that you absolutely need to make sure is taken care of and if there is a warning that's typically something that's not severe but you definitely you should still give it your attention now as we go down the screen here you're gonna see that we're gonna start to get more detailed information and this is where you're going to get some specific recommendations now as we go down we are going to be covering five different sections here we're going to be looking at basic seo advanced seo performance security and social seo now the first thing above all of those is priority it says automatic updates have not been enabled so if we want to enable those we can simply do that right there and that's done so you can see how quickly this really goes when you have this tool that's really helpful so let's look at basic seo so we're going to think of basic seo really like the foundation of seo so while these things may not feel huge to you if the foundation is weak then this is going to be hurting your seo efforts so we want to make sure that these tests here are passing now it is giving us some keywords that they're finding on our website so if those are the ones that are coming back to us we want to make sure those are keywords that we actually want to rank for and that will help give us a place to start working as well we have passed seo description making sure that one h1 tag was found on the website as well as h2 tags and going down we see an x mark now this means that we have not passed this test so it says some images on your page have no alt attribute so this is now telling us we need to go back to these images and add the alt attribute now you'll notice here on the right hand side there is a drop down that says how to fix and if we click that it actually pops up below all the information here a little box that tells us what we need to do so we need to check your images for missing alt tags and add a useful description for each image and add your keywords or synonyms but do it in a natural way so now we know exactly what we need to do and what rank math has provided us with is a full list of all of the images so we have one image here that has no alt tag this is the second one so now as you can see for this image the alt tag is empty so now we can go back into our media manager to find these images and add in our alt tag there so that is a pretty easy fix to take care of now we have keywords in the title and description those are not appearing there again we have the drop down and this is going to explain to us what we need to do and how we can do it that's going to be helpful in seo and as you see there are several other tests that were ran and it just shows one that we were not focusing on here and this means that there are 21 pages and 39 posts i have no focus keyword set so we're going to look at here in a few minutes going into the actual pages and posts setting our focus keywords and other keywords that the pages may rank for and this is really going to help us be able to target a particular keyword per page so we can start to rank for that and get traffic in there so that is basic seo that is where you want to start before you go on to some of the other issues you may find in the advanced seo section now advanced is just as it sounds this is really going to build on your foundation build on that basic seo and really take your site traffic to the next level here so under advanced seo we start with search preview and mobile search preview this is how you're going to be able to see if you were actually to google your website how does your website appear in search results so here you can see this starts with home new well that's probably not very enticing to anyone who googles for the website so that is something we now know that we need to change and we need to make note of and if we continue to scroll down we see the mobile snapshot so anyone who is visiting the website on a mobile device well this is what it's going to look like to them so this is obviously definitely something you should check we want to make sure the website is mobile friendly that just only continues to be more and more important now next up we have canonical tag and this is anytime you have a web page it can be accessed from different urls and since google considers these different urls to be different pages this is where google can believe that you have duplicate content on your site and index these different versions unless you are using this canonical tag so if you are not passing that test that is something you want to make sure you are getting added to your website here and this is something you would be able to change within your page or post when we go over and look at that now sometimes if you are not getting any traffic in any rankings it turns out that sites have a no index tag which is telling google hey don't come visit my website don't index these pages or send anyone my way now while they don't have to listen to that obviously if you want traffic and rankings you got to make sure this tag doesn't exist but it's been checked for you and it is not there as we were looking at with canonical tags google looks the different urls as different pages so you want to make sure that www and non-www versions of the site go to the correct url so google is indexing the correct one now your open graph meta this is really meant for social media sites so that an image and the text the description all display correctly and again that's something you're going to be able to edit on your specific post once we get in and we start looking at that the robots.txt file this tells google and search engines what they should and should not be indexing so what rank math is looking for here is is this file actually present but it will warn you if you have a disallow tag in your robots.txt file in case you are accidentally telling google that you do not want them to index certain pages or parts of your website just in case that that was not intentional so if you've passed you are good to go there but as we'll look at in a little bit when we look at some other settings you will see where you'll be able to change this so if you're like what is robots.txt i don't know about this don't worry we will have a look at that so you'll know exactly what to do here shortly in schema meta data this really as we talked about briefly before help search engines understand what your website is about what the actual page is about and this can make your search result appear a little bit differently depending on the type of content that you have and we even looked at that as we set it up and of course we've looked at google search console and the site maps so now we are going into the performance section to see how well the website is performing now one of the biggest things here is you want your website do you want all of your web pages to load quickly if your web pages are not loading quickly you are losing visitors no doubt but on top of losing visitors google doesn't like slower pages because they know visitors don't like slower pages so they're not going to rank your pages as highly and as you can see here we have several failed tests when it comes to that so we really have about 50 here that we've passed and other ones that we need to focus on now it says our response time is under 0.2 seconds which is great but we have a specific javascript file right here that says need to be minified and we have an image headers expire issue and again we have these how to fix issues here so this gives us more information about what we can specifically do to help increase our page load time make sure it is loading as quickly as possible now as you can see here this is saying that the pages are making 42 requests and anytime you are over 20 that's where you really start to see pages slowing so we are way over that and that is absolutely something that needs to be fixed since we can't dive into all the fixes that you can do specifically for performance i will link below some of the resources you can use so that you can help us speed up your site here so let's go on to the final section which is security now security is extremely important because you need to make sure that your website is secure from any hackers this is going to make sure that your site stays up that everything that is supposed to be displayed on your website does and doesn't end up linking to any unfortunate websites here so this is looking at several areas of security that you really need to be aware of and the first is visible plugins now plugins are one of the ways that a hacker can get into the website so first of all you want to make sure that your plugins are already updated but here this is saying that three of the plugins are publicly visible so if a hacker knows that a particular plugin has a loophole that they're able to exploit what they do is they go out and they look for all of the websites that are using that one particular plugin and that's where they have their in into all of these websites so if we have a plug-in here like this is publicly visible that's what we want to make sure that we don't keep that publicly visible so they cannot find this out and exploit any loophole that they may find so the same thing here with themes you want to make sure that those are always up to date and this is saying that that theme is visible as well so we want to make sure that this is hidden so i can't again like performance go into all of the ways to to fix this right here but i can leave some resources below but this at least gives you the starting point as to anything that you need to know about and be able to figure out so here we have our directory listing that has been disabled we have google safe browsing which means they have tested that there are no warnings or alerts that are appearing for visitors as sometimes as a website owner you may see the website appearing as normal and other visitors may see something different than you and lastly here that the site is using a secure transfer protocol or better known as http so that wraps up our seo analysis and it gives you the first handful of tasks that you need to do from the images that are right here we can copy those and go look for those in the media manager we have our keywords in the title description that we need to go in and fix and once we have fixed some of these basic seo settings here what i would do is go on down into the advanced and go from there as you can see we talked about the search preview with the titles here but before that we have the 21 pages and 39 posts that have no focus keywords set so since that's the next big thing that we want to do is make sure we know that as we create new post for our website or our blog that we are able to optimize those in order to get the most traffic and the highest rankings that we can and then we can use this same exact process for any of the previous posts so what we'll do is since we have all of these posts created let's go ahead and click on this here and this is going to take us directly to a list of the 39 posts that do not have a set keyword yet and as you can see we have a new column here called seo details from rank math now if you already know that you have a particular keyword in mind for these different posts what you can do is simply click on this little pencil icon here and you can type in the keyword for each of these posts but we're not going to do that here we're going to head on over to a particular post and we're going to walk through all of the different rank math settings that you can use for your current posts and any new posts that you will create so this is where things get fun and this is what you're going to be using all the time as you create new content for your website let's start with this post here 14 ways to add recurring revenue to your web design business now the goal of what we are about to do here with rank math is that the tools that they have for your post and your pages are there to help you increase the likelihood that you're going to receive as much traffic as you can and to give you specific recommendations based on the post that you have written so you'll see here on the upper right hand corner this little box here it says 22 out of 10 and it's a little bit red here so rank math is going to give you not only a color code but they're going to give you a score as well to help you see just how well your rankings we're going to click on that and that's going to pull up a box here now if you are using wordpress's a classic editor it does support this and you're just going to find this information here right below the post but if you were using a page builder like this site using thrive themes or divi or beaver builder or any of those other ones well it's going to look something like this here so as you can see we have a red box here now the color codes that they're going to give you are green yellow or red green means you have scored 81 or higher and that means your post is ready to publish you have passed all of the seo tests that they have and you are good to go if you see yellow that means you have scored between 51 and 80 that means your post isn't quite fully optimized based on the testing they've done and you probably should go back and do some tweaking before you publish the post in red as you can imagine is below a score of 50 and that means well you didn't perform so well in the test and you definitely got some work to do if you want this to rank so what we want to do now is start going through and looking at some of the errors that it's giving us this shows us here a preview of how this page is going to look in search results so if you want to edit that you can simply click on the edit snippet button there and edit the title the link or the description but you'll notice here that they have a character limit so this is how many characters you should plan on using uh this is 60 or less we have for the permalink 75 or less but we're using 88 so we may want to consider decreasing that length and then we have the description which we have pretty much maxed out there now one of the biggest reasons why we are very likely scoring only 22 out of 100 which i should add in here you want to get the highest score possible obviously because we're trying to get over 81 so that we are in the green now we do not have a focus keyword so there's no keyword that we've told google we're trying to rank for here so rank math doesn't know what we're trying to do here so we want to type in a keyword and you can see as you start to type in keywords they will give you some suggestions if it does not give you suggestions that is because you have not connected your free rank math account so you're going to need to do that in order to get these keyword suggestions but we can also add in now not only this focus key where we can add in some additional keywords here because we can rank one post for multiple keywords my only recommendation here is just don't go crazy here don't add in a whole bunch of keywords just for the sake of it make sure that they are targeted but for right now we're going to add this particular one but notice here how this keyword is highlighted in red that means this post is not optimized well for that keyword so let's keep on moving down here so under basic seo we have five errors that it is giving us now it's showing us we do have one good thing for us which is that the content is over 1500 words and that is above the recommended amount now it says the focus keyword does not appear in the seo title so when you have your keyword you do want to do your best to include it here in the title now the same thing for the description so we looked at the meta description so when we came back up here we wanted to look at the snippet we want to make sure that again that particular keyword that we're adding in here is also in the description now take this moment to add in you never ever ever want to sacrifice the quality of your post for search engines you want to make sure that this reads well for any site visitors they're the ones going to do the clicking they're the ones who are going to read and stay on your site so if this doesn't work for them and they're out of there your seo is going to suffer even if you start to rank so make sure that first you're worried about your site visitors and second that you are getting a well-optimized post so even if you don't get a score of an absolute hundred and the only way to get the hundred let's say is to sacrifice the quality for the visitors then don't just make sure it's over the 81 score now for the focus keyword not found in the url so this is where we were also back here in the snippet and we were looking at the url so we have recurring revenue and we have web design business here but it's not all together that's why it is highlighting it that way the next era is the focus keyword doesn't appear at the beginning of content another common seo practice is to take the seo keyword and to place it within the first sentence or two definitely within the first paragraph but as close to the beginning as possible so long as it reads correctly to help give you a small seo boost there it says the focus keyword doesn't appear in the content so that refers to anything below the first initial paragraph there we want to make sure that it has been added here somewhere as well now i want to show you here if we do add another keyword so let's add recurring revenue web design business just a little bit longer keyword now notice the first one is still more highlighted that means all of the tests down here relate to this first focus keyword but if we want to look at how well the post scores for any of the secondary keywords we simply click on that and you can see well now it's still red however when we go down here now there is only one error now because we can only add one focus keyword really into our description up top into our title our url this is a secondary keyword so that's not going to pop up but we do want to make sure that this is added somewhere possible within the content so we'll go back here to the first keyword here and we will go on to the next section here which is additional error so we're about half and half here the focus keyword is not found in subheadings like h2 h3 of h4 so we want our main heading to be in an h1 tag and then our secondary headings can be in our h2 tag as you can see these hub headings are an h2 tag which is good however these are just listing the different types of recurring revenue and they don't actually include a title so we can look at a way that we can potentially re-format this a little bit so we can use some h2 tags to include the keyword and maybe put some of these as h3 tags possibly we need to add an image with the focus keyword as an alt tag that's something very easy that we can do since we don't see any images here is to go ahead and just add in a an image in here and make sure that when we upload it that in the media manager we are including an alt tag that includes this keyword right here and that we actually want to rank for now keyword density is referring to the number of times that the keyword actually appears in the content and they compare that to the overall number of words that are in the post so if you have 1500 words like we do here on this post and you have mentioned the keyword 50 times well that is way too high but in this instance we have a score that is too low because it is not being mentioned which we've heard up here in the basic seo so adding that in is going to help us be able to rank for that as we looked at as well up above when we were looking at the the snippet here our permalink here is too long we should limit this to 75 characters and we currently have 88 so we want to look at a way that we can add in the actual keyword here and at the same time decrease the number of characters there and that will increase our score here now my goal here is to show you what some of these changes are why they're scoring lower and some are scoring a positive for us here so that you understand what some of these changes are then i will go and make some of these changes here and we'll see how this actually adjusts the score so we are linking to external resources meaning we are linking to other websites out there that would be a good reference or some more information or additional resource someone could benefit from after reading this particular post a lot of people don't like to add in a link to someone else's website just make sure it's opening in a new window and you are good to go but it's definitely helpful for seo now we looked at at the beginning of this setting up nofollow external links and this is giving us the recommendation that we do have at least one of those external links be a do a follow link and it has found that for us we are linking to the other resources and it says we haven't used this focus keyword before which is good for us to have checked because if we are trying to rank this post for this particular keyword and we've already tried to rank a different page for that same keyword perhaps we forgot then we don't want to do that because google doesn't know then which of those pages to show in search results and that can definitely harm you there so let's look at title readability obviously this is all about your title here and we want to make sure this is as compelling as possible not just for seo but also to make sure you are getting the clicks so we need to make sure the keyword is appearing in the sao title it says the title does not contain a positive or a negative sentiment keyword or a power word so there are certain words and this has been researched you'll see the links here if you want more information about it but there are certain words that when you include those words in your title they're more likely to be clicked when there's a more emotional word for instance that gets people to connect and they're more likely to click so that's something that you can look at as you form your titles and since numbers are also something that gets people to click that is something that you can include now of course that's not going to work for all titles so again you don't have to go for an absolute perfect 100 with every post but you just want to make sure we're at least getting over 81 and that we're balancing the seo work that we're doing with what is going to work for our site visitors and here we have content readability and all seems to be good here it says we have a table of contents that will break down the content so anytime you have a post that's really really long definitely a good idea to put in a table of contents it just really helps keep that post organized and helps site visitors be able to navigate through a larger post says we are using shorter paragraphs this is just referring to the overall format of your post that's not really what rank math does but you do need to make sure that your post is formatted well to keep the site visitors there and lastly we have a yellow warning the first one we've seen here that your content contains images and or videos since it is yellow but it does say we are adding images or videos what we can do is go ahead and just increase the number of images or videos so if you just want to add in one more image and then see if that changes to green for you that may help but really they just want to make sure that the post is well formatted that it is well optimized and that it has certain words and it has images videos that are going to help keep a visitor on the site so i'm going to go ahead and pause here and make some of these changes in the exact places that i was showing you and then we'll take a look at what that does for the score as i'm making these changes i just want to show you how just even a few changes can make a really big impact so as you probably remember from just a moment ago we had a score of 22 out of 100 and we were in the red and now i've only made a few changes and that has already bumped us up to 63 we are now in the yellow zone so we are moving right along here so let me show you real quick what i've done as you can see we have some more keywords that have added in i have picked a main focus keyword here which is recurring revenue streams for web designers now this keyword as we've added this you can see that this is now in the yellow so going over here to the edit snippet we have now added this keyword to the title and the title has the correct number of characters we have included this in the permalink here and actually this is a little bit wrong this should be for a web designer so now the permalink is correct it has the keyword and we are now in the correct number of characters that we should have you can see it gives us a little bar here to let us know just how well we're doing we could even add in some more keywords if we want to we could look for maybe one of those power keywords and then within the description we have also added in that keyword right here and made sure that we have the correct number of characters so just doing that just those changes right there you can see now actually now that i've made that change with the permalink that has now bumped us up to a 72 so we are very very close to the minimum of 81 that we need to get to and now all i need to do is come down here and fix these errors so as i have added in that focus keyword and just gone ahead and updated these snippets here with the title the description the permalink that has corrected some of the errors that we were looking at down here below so that is why that has bumped us up so i'm going to go in here now and look at making sure this keyword is also added in the beginning of the content that appears within the content and within some h2 tags for example adding in an image and and what not some of those other few errors that we looked at and see if we can't get this over 80. all right now you can see we have already hit the 81 out of 100 so we are now in the green so we can publish at this point but we can still keep working to improve our score but i have only made two changes in this time the first being to add the focus keyword in the first 10 of the content which you can see it has been added right here so that brought us up to a score of 72. i've also added the keyword right here and place that within an h2 tag and replaced the ones underneath these headers underneath here with an h3 tag and that took us from 72 up to the 81 that you see now so now you'll notice here that the focus keyword is now in green and we have these other keywords that have been bumped up to a yellow so those could still use some work but we're in the green for our main keyword so all of our basics have been done but i do want to point out here that you'll see that these have a solid green circle here so that means you are done you've done everything you can here and when we have a check mark like this with the white box but we're still green that means you can still do more to improve that so they may be looking for maybe 1700 words or a 2 000 word post in order to get that to a solid green check mark so if you get to the point where let's say you're at 81 or you're at 90 and you're wondering well everything is showing all good it's all showing green why do i not have a higher score well you have passed all the tests but if you want to increase the score even more well these are the ones that you look for so what we're going to do is we're going to go in here now and look at the keyword density now that the keyword density score you see here is 0.13 because we've added in the keyword here a couple of times we can also add that in maybe one or two more times and and see how that helps and add in an image here and we'll look at some of the title and we are doing pretty good so now let's go into this additional section here and it says we need to add in that image so let's go ahead and place that right about here so we'll add in an image right here we'll upload here we'll go over to the media library here i've added this image and this image has been named one of the secondary keywords so that can be helpful now right here is the alt text box so if you already have an image that's been uploaded in your media manager just go back to the media manager there the media library and look for that particular image and go into this alt text box this is where we're going to add that keyword and we'll go ahead and select this image so now you'll notice that has turned to green and we now have a score of 84. i have now brought the keyword density up to 0.25 what you're saying is low and the keyword is appearing four times i am going to actually choose to leave that as is because i have already used the keyword four times throughout the post and beyond that i really feel that it's going to start to look a little bit spammy and like i'm really trying to cram the keyword in so again my goal is to make sure that number one this is for the visitor not just for seo so since we are already in the green and i feel that i have used it and beyond that it just wouldn't look good it wouldn't read good i'm gonna leave that as is and i'm okay with that so sometimes you just have to use a judgment call on some of this now we're gonna look at title readability we have two errors here and we talked about these positive or negative sentiment and power words that they want you to use in your titles the purpose of this is when your web page appears in serps then you want people obviously to click through and so the better your title is the more people you're going to get to click through so we want to take a look at this now when you are creating these words you want to think about any words that you can use that would create emotion or create curiosity so this is why you see posts that include words like blow your mind or the fourth one is the best because it is making you curious you really want to know what's going to blow my mind which one is the best i gotta know so i have to click through or if posts say everything that you should know or if you think about a recipe or a bakery and they talk about bread and they talk about all the senses how soft it feels how it smells how it melts in your mouth then you really want to click through to see more about that when it comes to power words words like new people think that means it's better if you think about a new model or a new post or a new version of something everybody wants the latest and the greatest so people use the word new very often or you think about the word free and how powerful that is so it all depends on the type of post that you're writing so you can always look for power word examples online and see which one best fits yours so in playing around with our title a little bit some of them would go too long and make the characters too long some of them wouldn't actually change the score at all so in just simply adding the word best which is kind of like new that's what people want to know which ones are the best that's what we need to know here if we click out that has brought us up a couple of points so now we have a score of 86. now scrolling down a little bit you'll see all of the check marks are here we are all good to go it says and lastly in content readability which was good except for this one in the yellow it says your content contains images or videos so now we know we are in the green zone we are okay to publish if we choose to publish at this time we're we're good to go but if we want to increase the score even higher what we can do is come back and we can add in a video clip we can add in another image we can see if we can get into the green here and that'll bump us up a little bit and also with the keyword density but like i said i think that pushes us past where we're not focusing on the visitor and going into just focusing on seo so i'm okay with having a little bit lower score now we can also choose to do is since our focus keyword is green which is great we're good to publish for that we can now click on some of these secondary keywords and go down here and see what can we do to make that a little bit higher so again we have images that we could add in with maybe a secondary keyword in the alt tag we can look at the keyword density for those other keywords so other than that you know it probably won't take too much to get those into the green there but this is exactly how you're going to be optimizing your existing post and when you are creating a new post you will simply add in your content and you're going to follow the same exact process going step by step working to get your score in the green so now let's head over to the navigation bar here under rank math we're going to go to analytics and this is going to help us see how optimized your content is which pages are actually performing the best and see what's not performing so well so that way you know where to focus your time so as you can see here we are in the dashboard and this is going to give us a quick glance of a lot of different metrics here so to start off we have the overall optimization section now this is based on what we were just going through with optimizing the post right now we have one post and that's the one we just did that is scoring as good and we have the others have no data because they do not yet have a focus keyword this is going to give you a quick glance at how many of your posts have actually been optimized which ones need to be improved and which ones have not actually been optimized at all now i do want to point out here at the top you see this 30 day drop down if you want to change the numbers for a certain time period you can do that between 7 and 90 days so next up let's look at the second box here this is our performance overview this really shows us metric numbers and it also gives us a trend line so we can see where we've been and where we're going here so we can look at the number of impressions that we've had the total number of keywords the search clicks and average click through rate in the third box here we have our keyword report now you'll notice that this says upgrade here and that is because there are a few features within rank math that you actually need to upgrade to the premium version 4 and the keyword report is one of those this shows you the top winning keywords any keywords that have been lost it allows you to look for the best performing keywords that you are actually tracking as well as the overall keywords your site is ranking for so that's something you can choose to upgrade for as well here we have our keyword positions and this shows us our current standing in search results we currently have four posts that are ranking in the top three positions 23 posts in positions 4 through 10 and 238 in positions 10 through 50. so we have a lot of different posts that we can work on to help boost them up here to the first page now on any of these you can click on the open report link in the bottom right hand corner of the boxes and that's going to take you through and give you well a full report on all of this information now down here at the bottom this is something else you can upgrade for which shows you the top five winning and losing posts you can see what is performing the best for you and what is not performing for you so you can make a decision about what to do with that content now scrolling back up here to the top for a moment you're going to see a handful of tabs here across the top we're going to go on to the second one which is site analytics and you will see here again this is referring to the posts that have been optimized but you'll see this is going to be a premium version here so this is going to help you look at which of the posts you really need to be paying the most attention to and you're going to find more detailed information about each post from the seo score page speed suggested changes trends search traffic and so on now moving right along to seo performance this is where you're going to get a glance of six different metrics here and you are going to be able to see a trend as well for each of these metrics and so if you simply click on one it is going to enable the trend line and of course clicking on it will disable the trend line so you can see how well that is performing as well now as you scroll down here you will also be able to see the impressions clicks and positions for the different posts that you have so you can gauge how well those are performing and you are also able to add or remove any of those columns based on what you would like to see now back at the top under the keywords section here this is going to again give us a nice graph view of how many of our pages are performing in the different positions but you also see that we have a time frame here at the bottom so we hopefully are improving with the number of positions in the top three for instance and the number of positions in four through ten but as you go this gives you a nice graph so that you're able to see over a period of 30 days are you gaining in these positions so obviously as you first set it up you're not going to see big changes but as you begin working on this you will start to see a fluctuation in the colors here as you gain higher and higher positions and you also be able to see as you scroll down the keywords that are ranking here as well and just like on the last page you'll be able to add any new columns that you would like and remove any of the columns you do not want to see now lastly we have the rank tracker this is another premium feature that's going to allow you to see your keywords that are ranking in the first 100 positions so that's something you can choose to sign up for as well if you wish to have that access right here now that you are familiar with analytics let's come over here to the general settings section as you can see we have several tabs here and we're going to run through these here real quick the first step is links this is going to control what happens with links on your website and the first one is to strip category base so as you have different categories to help organize your content on the website if you choose to enable this this will take out the categories section of your url so it will just display as your domain.com slash your post name here this is not going to hurt or improve your seo so this really can come down to a matter of preference as well next up you have a redirect attachment so if a searcher or a search engine is trying to access an image with your url for example it's going to redirect them to the post rather than to that particular url of the attachment or image that you have so this actually does have plenty of seo benefits one of those is that it helps distribute the seo value of the links from your images and other page attachments that build over time in redirect orphan attachments an orphan attachment is simply a an image for example or another attachment that does not belong to any particular post so when someone tries to access an orphaned attachment you can decide what happens to that in this case we are going to redirect them to the home page which is what you would typically do here next up we have no follow external links we looked at this earlier on and this is simply how you can apply this nofollow attribute to all links that point to a third party site now these next couple of options here have to do with your nofollow external links setting here and really this is just going to help preserve the seo of your website which is why we're going to leave this on now this actually is definitely something you want to enable if all of your links are let's say affiliate links you have an affiliate site or you have a lot of sponsored posts that's a good attribute to go ahead and add on there but remember you can always add those in manually as well now the nofollow image file links is just like what it sounds this is going to add that same attribute to image links that are hosted on another site now the no follow domains here this works again with this section up here and this is where you can list links that should always be no followed so let's say you have this disabled so you can simply add in domain.com and you can have com whatever the domains are here that you do not want followed consistently whenever they're listed on your website just make sure to list them one per line now the same thing here with the nofollow exclude domains let's say for instance you always want this other domain domain 4 and let's say domain 5 as an example whenever those are linked to from your website those should always not include that no follow attribute there so that's how you can exclude and include that and lastly we looked at this as well earlier when we were setting this up is to open the external links in a new window which is always a good idea now next up in our tabs here we have bread crumbs as you can see there's only one option unless you actually decide to turn on breadcrumbs here so what breadcrumbs are is they really help users understand where they are on a website so if you think about larger websites like amazon just as an example this helps the user see where they are on that particular website and they can use that breadcrumb menu in order to click back to a particular section so this is typically used for the bigger sites it doesn't even have to be necessarily as big as amazon but if you do want to enable then you can set up the different settings that are available this is how would the breadcrumbs be separated so if you have the homepage to another category to a subcategory and so on you can choose any of these characters to separate those by now if you want to include the home page link then you can do that there and you can set that up and you'll see some of these others you'll want to just leave as they are here with these symbols so that any archived or search results will contain what they need to to show same thing for a 404 label you'll be able to edit how that actually appears and you can choose whether to hide the post title there show categories if the category is a child category for example so this will allow you to completely customize the way that your breadcrumb actually displays but depending on what theme you're using you will want to make sure that you have breadcrumbs actually set up to display correctly on your website and so rank math is giving you some code to help you make sure that looks as you want now moving right along to webmaster tools this is where you will need to verify your site with different webmaster tools now you certainly don't need to verify your site with all of these different webmaster tools you just need to pick the ones that are going to be relevant to you so for instance if you are in the us you will want to enable google search console bing webmaster tools but then you may not need some of these other ones here below unless you are specifically working to gain traffic from other countries as these are associated with different areas if you're going to be working with pinterest then that can be a good one to connect here as well so i'm not going to go into how to actually go through and verify this but you will need to set up an account you will need to verify that you are in fact the owner and then they will give you a code there and this is what you will simply paste into this box so a lot of information that is available out there i have a google search console tutorial that will help you actually see how to set this up and verify and where you're going to be grabbing that code if that would be helpful for you all right let's check out the others section now this is a very simple and a quick section here if you would like to display an seo score as a badge that actually displays in your post you can actually set that up here most people disable this but this is something that you can choose to do and if you do want to enable it it's going to let you customize this a little bit where do you want this to show should this show on light boxes for example or just on posts and pages do you want this to be a circle or a square should this be below the content above the content or both and do you want to include a link to rank math to give them a little bit of credit and so that's what you would need to actually enable that and get that looking the way you want to but we'll leave that off for now and if you have an rss feed you can add specific content before or after that feed and this is simply some of the variables here that you could copy and you could paste up here if you wanted to add any of that before or after your rss feeds in the next tab is where we're going to edit our robots.txt file if you're not familiar with this this tells search engines what parts of your sites you want them to crawl and which of them you do not now your site may already have a robots.txt file and if it does as you can see right here it says contents are locked because robots.txt file is present in the root folder this is telling me yes i already have robots.txt file available if you don't see that and you go to your website dot com forward slash robots.txt and something comes up well then you have that file there you can also google for a robots robots.txt checker and it will look at your website to see if you have that anywhere as well so if you want rank math to actually set this up for you and you to be able to edit that right here you will need to delete that file from your server or otherwise you just need to access your file manager there and find this file and you'll be able to manually edit so we're not going to go into what is a robots.txt file too much more and how you edit it and all of that there's a lot of great information out there about that if you're not familiar with it probably something that you want to get a little bit of help with next up is edit.ht access file now you're going to notice here at the top that we do have a little bit of a warning and the reason that this warning is going to be there is because this is not a file that you want to mess around with especially if you don't know what you're doing because this can break your site so you definitely always want to make sure that you have a backup of this file before you make any changes rank math does take a backup of that file they share that here with you but it is only going to be of the very last option so if you made a change and you save it then if you make a second change it's not going to give you all of those versions only the very last one so other than that if you do feel comfortable you've taken the backup you can click this check box here and then you will be able to make any changes that you need but again if this is not something you are familiar with definitely make sure you get help here now a 404 monitor helps monitor any broken links that are on your website so if a visitor tries to access a url and that url no longer exists for whatever reason this is actually a very common thing that you see because websites are constantly changing you are updating pages and changing pages and adding and deleting pages so what you want to do is use this 404 monitor to find any of these broken links for you so that you can quickly update them and this is really going to help you keep on top of that so in this 404 monitor you are going to see that you have two modes to choose from the simple mode records only the url where the error occurred and the time of the error the advanced monitor it actually captures a lot of additional information such as the referring url of the url with the error so that way you can see if they are linking from another site for example and that's what's broken so it really helps you pinpoint where the error or issue is coming from usually you want to stick with simple mode if you don't have a lot of these errors that come up because while advanced as you does give you some additional information it also requires additional resources to capture that information and to be able to store all of those logs for you so just stick with simple unless you start to see that you do get a lot of these errors and you really gotta spend some time identifying where this problem is coming from and then you can always come back here and switch to advanced log limit is going to limit the number of rows in your logs so typically we can set these to 100 but if you have let's say an e-commerce store has thousands of products you may need to increase that number for example but again this does take resources so you always want to consider that as well if there is anywhere that you do not want your monitor to check or to report any of these urls then you can do that here in the exclude path so if this is something for instance where you are making changes to your website and you know that this is going to result in some errors and you don't want them to be porting all of this and letting you know about this then you have all of these options here to be able to set certain paths that you don't want them to report on so this is really good if you are making some changes to your website and finally in this section we have the ignore query parameters this controls whether the 404 monitor ignores any query parameters when they actually log the 404 error so what we want to do is we're just going to turn this off for right now but if you do start seeing a lot of errors and you see that a lot of them have just different query parameters tagged onto them then you can go ahead and enable this so at the end of these do make sure that you are clicking save change here and we have our final two sections here so we have our analytics section and really there shouldn't be much for you to do here because we looked at this when we were setting up rank math in the beginning and we were connecting this with search console with analytics and adsense if you didn't do that well here is your opportunity to go in and do that again adsense is going to be one of the premium features here and lastly we have our redirections this is like a built-in redirection manager so this is going to help you eliminate some of those 404 errors that we were looking at just a moment ago so we have some different options here the first is debug read directions so typically we're going to keep this feature disabled and we really only want to enable this if we need to perform some diagnostics on specific redirects so for now we're just going to leave this disabled on fallback behavior this is how you can choose what happens when there is a redirect you are sending someone from one url to another but let's say something happened with that redirect and it doesn't exist what do you want to have happen should that go to your set 404 error page do you want people to go back to the home page or do you have a custom url that you want to send people to so that's what you'll be able to choose right there so when you redirect one url to another you can select from different types here so this could be a permanent move a temporary move and as you can see there are a handful of selections here so i recommend that if you start getting into redirections that this is something you look up and you can see the differences between these different types of redirections but most commonly you're going to be using a 301 or 302 redirect and lastly we have auto post redirect so if you change a url of a post in wordpress let's say nothing happens no redirects are automatically created that's something you would have to go in and do now what this does is if you enable this feature the auto post redirect fixes that by automatically creating a redirect for you from an old url to a new url whenever you change the url so let's say you go into a wordpress post and you say you know what we are updating our keyword and we have chosen a new focus keyword for example so i want to update the url and you change that if you have this automatically enabled it's automatically going to create the redirect from that old url that you had to the new one that you just created so this is a great one to keep so we'll go ahead and save those changes and that already wraps up the general settings here all right now that we are done with our general settings let's hop on over to the next section which has everything to do with our seo titles and meta tags here so this actually has a lot of different tabs here as you'll see going down the left hand side and while it looks like a lot some of these are a little bit more detailed but some of them are just super quick and easy to get through some of them they will look very similar so once you know what to mark for one you'll know what to mark for the others and we can kind of speed through some of those but the whole benefit of doing this right here and taking the time which i hope you're gonna do right now is that once you do this this sets the global settings for all of your pages and posts and so on so you only have to do it once so now once you define what you want to happen when you have new pages or posts those defaults will already be set when you create that new page or post so you do this once and then you don't have to redo it for every new page or post you create so let's go ahead we're just going to run straight through these now we're going to start with the very first tab of course which is the global meta tag here because these play an important role in how search engines perceive your content so it's really important that we make sure that these are optimized and that's exactly what we're going to be doing in this section now one thing i do want to know is as we go through this you may see a couple of sections here that you don't actually see on your screen and that's okay it's perfectly normal because there will be some options that are plug-in specific so you may actually see something on your screen as well that you don't see on mine and that has everything to do with the certain plugins that are installed if there's anything you need to optimize for those so let's start off looking at our first option here which is the meta tab which is the robots meta here you can set this for post but this again is going to define your default for all of your pages here so we have a couple of options we have the index or no index so do you want the search engines to index and typically you do or do you want them to not index but you'll also see a couple of other options here like no archive and no snippet for instance so with no archive this particular tag is useful when you have pages where the content changes a lot or you have content on those pages that you want to protect so if you think about a membership site or you have coupon pages that are constantly being updated with new coupon codes then you don't want them to archive that particular page you want that to be shown fresh and for the no snippet tag this option allows you to restrict search engines from showing snippets on your post sometimes you may not want a snippet to show on your post and if that is the case that you can set that otherwise you can just leave that unchecked as we have here and then if you end up in that particular situation and you want to mark that for a particular post you can do that when it is created so now we have this advanced robots meta section here and you'll see that there's a snippet video preview and image preview here now the reason that this is here is because if you think about when you have gone to google you don't often see just standard text search results right you start to see a lot of times what is called rich results or rich snippets and this is where for instance google can display text that they've taken from a particular web page they can show a video or image as an example here and when this started happening this was really frustrating to the website owners because searchers were finding an answer that they needed right there on the search result page and the website owner was not necessarily getting the traffic to their site for that so because of that google created the advanced robots meta directives which is now allows you to manage this a bit so there are the three types here that you have control over the snippet the video preview and the image so if for instance let's say you have a snippet and you decide that you don't want the snippet to show 500 characters for instance well now you can change this to any number that you like so if let's say you put in here 200 that's going to limit the number of characters to 200 characters of text that they can show if we leave it as is right there with the negative one that means they can show an unlimited number of characters now with a video preview this is a little different as when someone hovers over a video do you notice how some of them have that preview available where it just kind of skips through a little bit of the video so we can we can get that preview if you want them to only be able to do that let's say for three seconds you can pop in a three and if you again want to leave that as unlimited google can decide well you can leave that as the negative one now with the image previews you can say that you do not want any images or that they can display a standard or a large image so this gives you a little bit more control with what google is going to show the only thing you want to be careful of is for a snippet as an example if you limit this to 100 characters well if google has a minimum character limit in order to display that snippet and your limit that you set falls below what google has in mind they're not going to choose your result to display there so just something to keep in mind next up we have the no index empty category and tag archives this we actually do want to enable here so wordpress automatically creates archive pages for all of the categories tags and taxonomies that you use on your website so if you've created a whole bunch of categories and tags but you don't actually end up using those categories for example with any posts then archive pages are actually created but they can also be indexed so what we want to do is enable this so those empty archive pages are not indexed because that's not going to be useful to a searcher and at the same time that's going to waste some of our crawl budget we want google crawling the pages that matter to us most that we want it to have appear in search results next up we have a separator character this is simply when you see that you have a post title and then you have the blog name for instance you have this character right here in between the two and so now you can simply check which one of these you like the most and that way you can use that character in search results now the rest of these are pretty self-explanatory do you want to automatically capitalize the first character of all of your title tags so see how each of these have a title if you would prefer for it to be written as you have written it in the post then you can leave that disabled now an open graph thumbnail this is the thumbnail that if you do not have a featured image for a particular post let's say and that gets shared on facebook what is the default image you would like to have appear on social media so we have uploaded that during our initial install and then we have the twitter card type you can select how you want your card to actually appear do you want it to have just the summary card or the summary card with a large image so that's what we'll do here and then we will move on to the next tab which is local seo now this is a pretty simple and straightforward section here this has all the settings related to a local business so if this is not you well then you can just remove this information and you're not actually going to use it otherwise math rank is going to add the necessary metadata to your site for google to actually recognize your site as a local business website and this helps google show your website in search results for queries and searches that are related to your business type so what you want to do here is just go through and select is this a person or is this an actual organization and then put in either the personal or the company name here and scrolling down we'll add the logo which has been done during our setup and the site url and you are done so that is a pretty easy tab to get through now let's go on over to the social media tab as you can see this is going to ask you for your social media information so this is where you can put in your facebook page url your authorship your facebook admin if you're not familiar with that that is an id number and you can click this little link right here which will take you to findmyfbid.com and so that will actually help you figure out what your id number is and you can pop that in here so all of this will take you if you're not sure where to get the information it will include a little helpful link here so you know what to include there so that is another pretty straightforward one there now next up we have the page this is where you can set the meta and open graph details specifically for your home page now we have already set what we want the home page to be and so that was already done before rank math was installed so this is just giving us the link to go and be able to change any of the settings there that we want which is exactly what you'll be able to do as well all right moving right along into post formats in this section this is handling the post formats archive pages so we want to enable for these to be no follow and we can have these set to no index because again these are archive pages this isn't something we want coming up in serp so we're just going to know index that and leave that as is now we are on to the authors page so as we've just seen wordpress creates category and tags and even date archive pages and just like that they also create these author archives here and so these settings are all related to those author archive pages that they create now typically what the recommendation here is is if you only have one author on the the blog or the site here is that you can disable this and then that's it that is all you need to do because this can result in duplicate content which you definitely don't want when it comes to seo and when you disable this this just redirects these author archive pages back to the home page now on the flip side if you have multiple authors that is when you tend to enable this section here so that you can customize this a bit more so if that is you let's take a look at some of the options here now some of these are going to look familiar the first is with the author url so normally your author url would be yoursite.com forward slash author like you see here forward slash and then the author name now if you want to change that middle section here the author then that is what you'll be able to change right here now we have the author robots meta and this is to help you configure robots meta for these author archives now in the next sections here we can choose whether we want to customize the author robots meta here and if we disable that you'll see that some of the options have disappeared but if we want to enable that that allows us to no index those author pages and then we can leave it as that and the rest of the information is not as as important here but we can customize if we do want to have them the actual title and the descriptions here you'll see if we click on the drop down box here that this tells us what all of this means so if we want to have the author name for instance this is the code that we would use we have the site name or the page for instance and you can see how that displays right here it's going to give you a preview of that and you have a lot of different options it tells you if you want to add the current time what the code is so you can simply click that and you'll be able to add it in and again it updates that preview for you same thing here in the description and you're going to see this coming up here in other sections so you'll be familiar already but you can see this is the character that separates it just like right here and you can make this anything that you want so if you want to just type in for let's say description just start typing that in and it will give you all the little codes here that may be relevant then you can click on that and add that in if that's what you want to do now next up we have the add seo meta box for users this gives you the option to optimize authors page title meta description and social sharing for each individual author that you have on the site so again this is good to enable if you do have multiple authors and what you'll be able to do is go over here to users and then click on your profile here and then you can scroll down to the rank math meta box and then this is where you would be able to customize that assuming of course you have this enabled and that's what you would like to do now heading back over here we were on author so that wraps up the authors section let's go to the miscellaneous pages here now this covers the settings for all the other pages that we haven't looked at like the search page and the 404 page and other pages like that and first up we need to either choose to disable or enable date archive so these are the pages that wordpress creates to organize your content by the dates posts were published so you have probably seen this on sites where the url would be something like your site dot com forward slash 2021 forward slash 01 as an example there so typically for these we just leave these disabled and unless the you have a very specific reason for wanting to to do that there the 404 title is pretty self-explanatory if someone ends up on a page not found they will receive a 404 error and are redirected to a 404 page and this is where you can choose what do you want the title of that page to be and as you can see there is some static text and some dynamic text here and you can choose what you like from the drop-down or in this case here where it says page not found simply just type in what you would like to have appear now it's very similar a search results title if you would like to customize how those miscellaneous pages like the search results page or a 404 page for instance if they were to show up what do you want the title of that page to be and again you can customize that and preview that there so let's take a look at the no index search results this is typically disabled so what that means is we're going to click this on and we're going to make sure this is blue here as your search results pages if you have a search box they don't really have much content in any content that they're going to display you should already be indexing and should appear in the search results so we just want to prevent our search engines from from indexing those pages so we would also like to enable this option here this is for pages that are split into multiple pages so for instance if you have your site dot com slash post and your site dot com slash post slash one and your site dot com forward slash post slash two for instance we really only want search engines to index that first page and not the second and the third the user can then go to the second and third pages from that first one that is index that they arrive on now in the note index archive subpages these are the archive pages that can also have multiple pages like we just looked at in the last example so we also want to disable this so those pages are not indexed and if you have any password protected pages so wordpress does give you this option there's typically not a reason why you would want search engines to index those or to display those in search results because well they're password protected and they're hidden for a reason so typically we want to go ahead and enable those so we will save those changes and now we have already completed that first section here under titles and meta and we are on to the post types and first up is post now this is definitely a section that you're going to want to pay attention to because the settings that you are creating here are going to affect your individual posts that you create so remember these are the global default settings so every post that you create is going to have these settings from right here that you're about to set up by default but do keep in mind that when you create a new post you're going to be able to override any of these settings for that individual post now a lot of these are going to be pretty self-explanatory like the single post title so as you can see here it has the post title it has the separator character right here followed by the site name if you like that well you can keep it just like that that's what we will do and if there is anything else that you would like to add or if you'd like to change again we have that same drop down here and you can add that in and same for the post description right now it is set to excerpt and that way it'll take a part of the post there and include it and you can select from any of the other options here as well now the schema type is what you want to set for the default most of your posts are probably going to be articles but in the event that you post things like events or job postings music your products or recipes then you may want to change the default otherwise if you just tend to publish a lot of blog posts well that is exactly what you can leave this as and for the headline this will be relevant for schema then you can just use the seo title for instance so if again you have an article and you want the headline to be just the title of that article that is what you'll publish so that is going to be the most common and same for the description here as well and now that you have article you can select the specific type of article in this case we are going to be publishing blog posts which is the most typical option here now if you want to customize the robots meta then you can do that we have already set the default to that for indexing when we were setting up the plug-in so we definitely want to keep it as is and again we looked at the robot the advanced robots meta earlier with the snippets the video previews the image previews if you do not want to leave those as unlimited and give google kind of free rein there and you want to change this then this is where you can do that otherwise you can just leave this off it'll leave it as the default with what you set up but otherwise we will just leave this as is here now we have link suggestions when you enable link suggestions this is one of ranked math's unique features it will give you link suggestions when you're writing your post and you'll see it on the right hand side of your post and then when you enable this you will be able to let them know do you want them to look for titles that are relevant or are you wanting them to focus more on the keywords that are relevant so you'll be able to decide between the two based on the type of content you create and how you create that what's best for your site and for the primary taxonomy this is when we look at breadcrumbs do you want nothing to display there for the taxonomy do you want it to be the actual category or tag for instance so we are going to leave this set to categories in the at in the add seo meta box this is going to this we definitely want to enable because this is going to give us full control over the seo features for individual posts which is why we are installing rank map so we're definitely going to leave that enabled and bulk editing if you have a an existing site and you have now added rank math and you have all this content and you're like oh now i need to go optimize all this content what you can do is you can enable bulk editing so now when you go over to your post list you will see a column that allows you to bulk edit right there so you can go through some of this editing a lot quicker now you can always go back to let's say your top pages the top performing pages be able to edit those individually but just to get the ball rolling you can always bulk edit some of those which can be really really helpful all right now i mentioned earlier that some of these are going to look very very similar now the pages is very very similar it's actually just like the post so you're going to go through this same settings we just did for post except now you're going to do it for your pages so you're probably going to have very very similar settings if not the exact same settings as you do for your post but they're all the same so everything we just covered under post is now under pages so we're going to make that the same now under attachments we looked at what happens to attachments a bit ago and we set any of those attachments to go to the home page so if we want to disable that so that we can edit these attachment settings here then we need to disable that setting but we're happy with that setting because that's the way we set it on purpose there so we're going to leave that as is now in the final two boxes of post types you see thrive symbols in a thrive light boxes but if you take a look at your own screen if you are not using thrive themes then you're not going to see those you may actually see something else if you have different plugins installed or a different page builder for instance so i'm not going to go into customizing these because this may not be something you need to do at all but this is where you will see several of the same settings that we've already looked at for your plug-in so you will at least be familiar with them and you can go through and you can set those but for now what we will do is we will move on to the third category here which is about posts and we're going to be looking at categories and tags so in our categories this is where you're going to be able to set the meta title and descriptions of your category archive pages so again remember wordpress is creating all these archive pages and this isn't something that we are actually doing ourselves it's happening automatically in the back end here so with our category archive titles we can leave it as the default because this is what we've set up during install and we can go in here and customize these for the archive pages we would rather have these no index than index so we're just going to switch that here and if we wanted to add the seo meta box we could but that's not something we're going to be editing and remove snippet data so this will remove schema from category pages which we do want to enable and the reason being is because schema is really meant for individual pages or posts or products and not for really category pages so we want to enable that there so categories was quick and easy let's go on to tags now tags gives us the options for our tag archive pages so this is just like categories and it has the same settings here so again we're gonna no index these and we're going to remove the snippet data from these tag archive pages there as well so we'll save those changes and then we'll head over here as you can see this is about symbols now again this is relevant to thrive symbols and it's probably something you don't see on your screen and you may or may not see something else there so that is that we have covered now the titles and meta section and you've gone through all of that now you have set up your global defaults and this is going to save you so much time whenever you're creating pages and posts in the future moving right along now to our last detailed section which is site map settings now this is the last detailed section that you're going to have to look at but it is one you definitely do not want to skip because this has everything to do with a site maps as i'm sure you can guess by now but this is very important to seo and the reason for that is because your sitemap helps search engines very efficiently navigate your site because a sitemap for those of you who are not familiar contains all of your content it really sorts out for google and other search engines which pages posts or parts of your site you want them to crawl and the ones that you do not want them to crawl so this is your way of helping google prioritize what parts of your site are most important for them to be able to index now one thing that is important to note is that your site can have multiple sitemaps you just want to make sure that you are not duplicating your content in the different sitemaps and you don't want to do that because again this is about helping google be efficient so if they are finding the same posts for instance in two different sitemaps well they're having to crawl both of them twice and that's not helpful so that may lead them to not be able to discover some of the other content you do want them to index now everyone's site map can be different and it is going to vary depending on your site so this may be an area that you want to spend some time reading up on but what we're going to look at here are the general settings so you can decide what is best for your particular site so we're going to start off here at the very top with the general tab now as you're going to see in these upcoming sections here your sitemap url is going to be listed for you right here at the top so this is going to allow you to take that and submit that in your google search console account again go over to that tutorial if you're not familiar with that but you are going to put it in there and that's going to help google be able to find it now we want to look at the links per site map this is the number of links that you will have per page on your site map now if you have a smaller site not too much for you to worry about but it is easier for google to crawl a smaller page of links so that is why about 200 is a good number to go for now next we have images insight maps images are good to index as they actually can show up in search results we've seen some of that already and some sites are more image rich than others so you'll have to just decide if you want your images to be indexed as well but typically i go ahead and enable this feature because if it can bring in any traffic then why not do that but you know again you got to think about for your particular site if that makes sense now the next one is to include featured images so while your featured image may or may not show up on your actual post that really depends on how your site has actually been designed if there is one i still go ahead and enable this now under exclude post if you have any post that you do not want google to crawl you do not want to have those posts indexed what you can do is put in their id number here and just separate them by commas and as it says here below you can also do this for not just the post but pages and custom post types as well so if you're not sure how to get the id what you want to do is go over to your post your page and when you go into that page from your wordpress dashboard look up at the url and you'll see post number there at the top post equals and then it will have the number there that is your id number and then you can come back over here to exclude posts and type in that id number so if you have a few posts it may look like this 5 comma 13 comma 21 and those would be the three post ids that you would not want to have in your sitemap i'm going to remove those since that's not the case here now next up we have exclude terms so this allows you to exclude entire categories or tags that are supported there so if you do not want certain categories as an example to be included there in the sitemap then you can put in that category id so likewise with the post what you'll do is you'll head back over to your categories you will click on the particular category you want to exclude and up in the url there you will find the category id number and you can come back and pop it in here and lastly in this section we have ping search engines so this is a way for rank math to let search engines know that your site map has been updated so anytime you have that updated you can do that here and you can simply enable that by keeping this blue and save your changes there now once that is saved we're gonna head over to our post type section and we're gonna start off with the post so now you can see we have a post sitemap url here at the top now as you probably guessed this has all the settings that affect this site map for your posts on your website here so include in sitemap this controls whether or not you are going to include your post in the sitemap so typically this is something that you want to enable there and if you want to include any custom fields in your post that have image urls then if you want to do that you can simply add those here one per line now pages is going to be very easy because this is the same thing as the post you'll see now the url has page instead of post but again you can choose to include this enable this as a site map here and include any image custom fields if you want to and now we're going to look at the attachments now for the most part we don't enable the attachment site map because attachment pages tend to be very thin content pages and as most of you probably know google doesn't like thin content pages so that's not a page that you typically want to have indexed unless you really have a very specific unique case that you would do that for but we did look at this in the general settings over there on the media tab this has all of the settings that affect the site map settings for your attachment pages so that is something that we've already taken care of over there now as you'll see again just like we looked at in the last section there are a couple sections here specific to the plug-ins so we don't need to go through those in case you are not using those but i would not enable those for these particular plugins so lastly we'll look at the taxonomies section here starting with the categories and just as you can guess i'm sure as like the others the settings here are related to the site maps for your wordpress categories so first up you do need to decide whether to include categories in your sitemap and typically we do enable this setting because categories give structure to the overall website so that can be helpful now the next one is a little different than we've seen so far and that is to include empty terms so if you have empty categories so remember these are the categories that you've created or that are created that there are no posts or pages associated with it so there's no actual post inside that category it's just an empty category on your site and you have to choose whether or not you would want to include those archives in your sitemap so we're going to leave that as disabled now heading over to tags well just like pages and posts are very similar the same with categories and tags so now you can choose to include tags and if you do whether you want to include the empty ones which typically will disable so that is the final one here as this last one has to do with a plugin specifically and that wraps up our site map settings now let's look at the last few sections here which are super quick and easy especially compared to what you have done so far so next up is our role manager we talked about this very briefly during our initial setup so this is going to allow you to assign certain users certain specific roles within rank math so for instance you probably want your admins to have full access to everything within your rank math plug-in there and you may want some of the other roles or users within wordpress to not have as many so this allows you to still give different users different access and if there's anyone that you've added that you don't want them to have any access to that well that's fine you can certainly disable that here so for instance if you want to give someone the ability to be a contributor maybe write a post but you don't want them to have any access to your analytics well you can simply leave it just like this same with subscribers and they won't have access to anything you can see here in the middle the editor and author have some access but not all access so again you can simply click on any of them to enable or disable their access and then just make sure to update the capabilities at the bottom now over in our 404 monitor here this is where you will have your access log really to be able to see all of the 404s that come up how many hits they have gotten and what the access time is that way you can take a look at what is actually receiving these errors so you can see if any of these can be fixed now next up is redirection so we've talked about that a little bit here and the site doesn't currently have any redirection since this is just being set up but this is where if you need to you can come and set up a redirection we did look at a couple of settings where you can automatically have a redirection created say if you have an a post with the old url and you want to update it and they will automatically create that redirect from the old url to the new url for you and you're going to be able to see all that here but if you want to create one you simply click on add new you're going to be able to put in the source url and then you'll see your different choices here so if you want an exact url you can put that in for instance you can put in the new destination url and we talked briefly about the different redirect types and you can select the one that is most appropriate activate it and add redirection and from there it will appear on your list so if you ever need to come back and you need to change any of the settings or you need to delete it you'll be able to do it from this redirection list in the seo analysis this is going to be super brief because well this looks familiar right we have already been here and worked on this so as you start to make changes though and you start to implement some of the suggestions that have been talked about here or provided to you you always be able to come back and see your progress and you can click on start analysis again to re-run this analysis see what your score is looking like and see if there are any new recommendations that have come up because again websites are constantly changing so that's always a good thing to do under status and tools now this is probably not a section that you're really going to spend any time in but i just want to highlight a couple of things so you'll notice a few tabs here across the top here if you scroll down there is an auto update feature so anytime that the rank math plugin is updated you can decide whether or not you want those to automatically be updated if you prefer to do the update so you can monitor how that affects your site if it does then you can simply turn that off and click save but just make sure you are monitoring it so that you can make sure that your plugins are staying up to date now looking over here at database controls this is really where you would come if you want to reset any of the data that you have added or you need to delete any data so you'll see here we have clear seo analysis clear cache clear 404 log so this is where you're going to clear out some of the data or delete redirections as you can see so you'll be able to come here and get familiar with those but anytime you want to delete or reset a lot of data come back here to these database tools now under system status here this has as you can see a lot of the different plugins you have rank math you have wordpress your theme these different plugins here so this is going to be particularly helpful if let's say you have ever have a problem if you have a problem with rank math and you need to get any support you have an error log here but you'll also be able to come back here and it's going to tell you specific information about the different plugins and your theme and whatnot your version number your database number and so on so that way it might help a developer be able to pinpoint any issues that you may have and lastly here we have an import and export feature so we looked at this briefly as well in install but this is where you're going to be able to come at a later date after you've installed this if you need to come back to be able to import or export any settings if you're taking everything that we've done today and you don't want to go back through all of this and you just want to export the settings and import it into a new site well this is where you can do it so that is highly recommended again we looked at being able to export data from a different seo plugin into rank map if there was a plug-in it would appear here and it would allow you to import those settings and you can always take a backup so now that we have gone through all of the settings and we have set our defaults made everything the way we wanted it to be now we can go ahead and create a backup just so we have that we don't have to start from scratch if we ever needed to restore our settings here for any reason so you've done it you are amazing you've gone through this whole navigation section now here with me lastly here you do have help and support that is going to take you over directly to the rank math website they have a lot of documentation there if you have questions you'll be able to ask there if you if you need to get your free account if you haven't already you can do that if you ever want to upgrade you can do all of that over there now just before we wrap up here let's pop back over to the dashboard for just a moment and you're going to see all of these boxes here as you did get a glimpse of before you'll notice that several of them are enabled because we have already worked through those in the settings that we have just been through there are a handful that we have not touched on and some of these are going to be very specific for only certain sites and a lot of you may not even need this so for instance if you have advanced custom fields and you want to be able to enable that then all you'll do is simply enable that here but you need to activate the specific plug-in for this and you will have settings here that you'll be able to go into to customize that also just like that if you are going to be using amp which are accelerated mobile pages then what you're going to need to do is simply enable this here and this is going to add required meta tags to all of your amp pages if you're not familiar with that well then you probably don't have those and you can keep that disabled for now but for those of you who are using that that is going to be useful for you to do and you'll be able to access what you need to inside the plugin here so we already have analytics done and if you are using bb press or buddypress then you're going to be able to enable those here that's going to help you optimize your forums and all the posts and everything that's going on over there so that you can make that more seo friendly but if you are not using forms or any of that using these specific plugins you'll just leave those disabled under image seo if you want to have alt and title tags automatically added to your images then you can enable this and you can pop over to the settings here and it's going to allow you to set that up or simply really enable this and then you can select what you would want that alt tag to be so do you want that to be the file name do you want it to have a separator character or a site title any of that in it you can set that here typically i just like to leave these disabled because i want to do this personally but if you're adding in a whole bunch of images it can really be helpful to you so that depends now for instant indexing this has to do with bing so what you can do is simply enable this here it'll give you the settings box and this is going to allow you that anytime you have new pages new posts that rank math is automatically going to let bing know so just like we have google search console you will have a bing webmaster tools account that's a free account if you don't have one sign up takes a few minutes to do it's very similar to the process of google search console for getting that set up and this will walk you through how to actually get that api key that you need from your account to put in here and that will take care of the work for you and go ahead and save your changes now heading back over here to the dashboard let's see if there's anything else here we've looked at the links local seo and knowledge graph schema all of this if you do have the google web stories plug-in and you want to make sure that is optimized for seo then you can enable that and go and update those settings and lastly we have woocommerce which is amazing if you have an e-commerce site you have it running on woocommerce this is going to help you add extra metadata and product schema which is really going to help your products and your site stand out in search results so that's definitely something you would want to enable if you have an ecommerce site running on woocommerce so that my friends is rank method i know this was very detailed we covered a whole lot here but i really want you to not just know that this plugin exists i want you to know how beneficial this really is when you take the time to set this up properly and then now as you go back to your full list of posts and you are creating new posts you're optimizing these posts that you can really start to see your traffic coming in so if you have any questions or anything you want to talk about in terms of rank math go ahead and drop a comment for me down below let me know if this was helpful please do give the video a thumbs up if you did find it helpful subscribe to the channel and hit that notification bell so you get notified of new tutorials just like this thank you so much for watching and being here with me i'll catch you on the next video you

Channel: Portable Entrepreneur

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Id: 616VBDk9oRM

Length: 117min 9sec (7029 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021