WordPress SEO 2020 | Rank Math SEO Plugin Tutorial

now rank math is a free seo or search engine optimization plugin for wordpress that helps improve your search engine rankings and ultimately helps you rank higher in search engine results now search engines have very sophisticated algorithms that analyze your web page the titles the description keywords and even the url structure to help you rank for your specified search terms so a tool like rank math helps you easily manage those titles meta descriptions keywords and even your page readability so this helps you easily craft the content to be more user-friendly and visible to search engines like google now they've taken a look at what rank math seo is the next thing we need to do is install it to do that we're simply going to head over to the plugins and click on add new from there we're going to go to the top right hand corner and we're going to search for rank math once we find that we're going to go ahead install that and once that's installed we'll simply go ahead and activate the plugin once it's installed and activated you're then going to go through the wizard of setting rank math up now the first thing you can do is connect to a free rank math account i would highly recommend doing this because there are some added benefits but if you don't want to you can simply hit the skip now button for me i'm going to choose the option to connect my account and then we're going to go ahead and connect that through to the account that i've created previously now once you've finished logging in you then take it into the wizard for right mouth where we can set up the basics now you have a couple of options here you can choose easy if you're new to rank math seo or if you want to get in and have full control over things you could use the advanced option i'd recommend if you are new to seo and follow along with this guide stick to the easy until you get more accustomed to it so we're going to choose the easy option we're going to come down and we're going to say start the wizard and from there you can see we've got the getting started wizard we can now choose to input data from any other seo tool we may have set up now we currently have nothing this is a clean new site so i'm going to uncheck that option and we're going to say start the import or skip don't import now so we'll choose skip and we'll jump over then to the your site option now this is where we can configure things to do with our website itself first thing we've got to do is my wordpress site is what type of site are you actually running so you can see we have some options personal blog community blog and so on now for this example i'm going to leave this set up as a personal blog saying that this example that we're using is exactly that but you could choose any other option that is relevant to you and what your actual site is all about so we'll choose personal blog the logo for google you can see that's already set up inside there but if you didn't have that or you wanted to change it you can simply click on the x to change it add or upload and then you can choose the image that you want to use so i'm going to go back and select that one again and say use this file then you've got your default social share image and again you could do the same here so if you had a default image that you wanted every time you shared a social post you could set that up inside here or you can set it up individual ones on a per post basis which we will take a look at a little later on we're going to say save and continue to move to the next stage and this is the google search console so we can now link this through to our search console as part of google and this helps us to monitor and set everything up to make sure that we have all the information we need when we're doing searches when we're setting up our seo and all those kinds of useful things it's totally free to set up a google search console account and i've already got one set up so i'm going to show you how we can link this through now there are a couple of steps to setting things up with a google search console and it can seem quite confusing to start off with but once you've set things up the benefits really do outweigh the negatives for this however if you don't want to go through this stage you can't simply click on the skip step option to move on to the final stage however i'm going to show you how to do this and then it's entirely up to you whether you want to follow along or not and the time stamp will be in the description so if you want to skip this you can do just that so we're going to say get authorization code that's going to open up a new tab and from there it's going to ask us to choose an account so you can choose the google account that you want to link this through to so i'm going to choose my account once you've done that that's then going to say do you want to allow rank math seo to have access to the following data providing you happy with that you can say allow obviously if you're not happy you could cancel this and then skip the stage completely if you wanted to we're going to say allow and then it says please copy this code switch to your application and paste it in this we're going to copy this little bit of code and we're going to close this window down i'm going to drop that inside there i'm going to say there we go that's now authorized now you can see it says search console profile and if we click to open that up our site isn't actually listed inside you because we need to actually add the site to the search console before we can do anything else so we need to get the website verified and a few other little things now to do this we've got a couple of things we need to do first of all instead of following along with the wizard we're going to open a new tab up and from there i've searched for google webmaster tools that's going to allow me to go into the search console so i'm going to open that up providing you've got an account a google account you can simply log in by clicking start now and that'll take you through now what this is going to do is going to show you if you have any other sites listed it'll show you those sites or at least one of those sites if you don't doesn't matter the process is still the same in this top left hand corner we're going to click and we're going to say add property now property is simply just a website url so we're going to say add property and from there we have the option to add a domain or a url prefix for this example we're going to choose the url prefix i'm going to switch back into our tab with our site on it and then we're just simply going to copy the url so we're going to highlight just the url nothing else after it copy that from there come back in and we're going to just paste that into this section so paste that in there and say continue that's going to verify this property and providing everything is in place you can see it now this has been verified and if we choose to go to the property that'll take us through to the details of this particular website now obviously there's nothing going to show up inside you for performance or anything like that because the site currently has nothing inside the google search console and besides it doesn't really matter too much because we're going to manage pretty much everything for this inside the dashboard of wordpress as part of ranked math seo anyway but like i say there are some added benefits to linking it through to your particular website via the google search console okay so now we're going to go back to our wizard we're going to carry on from there we're going to refresh these sites and you can see there's our uae which is the site that we've got set up and we're simply going to say save and continue to move on to the next stage and there we go we are now at the end of the rank math wizard so we can choose to return to the dashboard or we can take a look at the help page if we want to find some more information about how to start getting the most out of rank math now if you are new to seo and specifically to rank math i would suggest taking a look at the help pages because they can give you some really useful insights in how to get the most out of not only your seo but also the rank math plugin and should go beyond what i can cover in this video tutorial so i'd recommend taking a look at that also the rank math knowledge base okay so let's say return to the dashboard and that'll take us back in now to the rank math section of our wordpress dashboard at which point if we want to we can configure a range of extra different options if you're not comfortable with this kind of thing i would say the most part you can leave the default settings because rank math is going to do a very good job of setting the key things up for you as part of setting the whole process up now there is one thing that i would suggest editing to make sure it works the way that you are happy with and that's the titles and meta tags so we're going to come over to the options under the rank math section and simply choose titles and meta once we open that up you can see there are lots of different options for the different types of post formats the different types of seo you may want to consider configuring now don't feel overwhelmed by all the options that may be here at first appearance because we don't really need to change too many things and what i'm going to show you is purely optional more of a cosmetic thing than anything that's going to really change your seo results and that's things like the separator characters for example and all this means is you can see the example in this preview we've got the post title separated by the name of this particular website and we can change that little symbol in there so we can change it between dashes we can change these little chevrons we can use the pipe a full stop range of different things or we can even drop one of our own custom options in there so you may want to do something like two of these pipe symbols just to give it a little bit of something more unique these are totally optional but they can help to separate the title of your post or your page from the name of the blog or the site that you're working on and can be very useful and a great way of just separating that information but you can like i say come in and adjust so many different parameters inside you when you feel more comfortable with it for example if you're a local business and you may want to enhance your local seo options you can see your local seo setting we can click inside there and we can configure things for that as well and these are things that can definitely help you get better search engine results in local businesses and if you are working with local companies local individuals and you want to dominate that aspect of the seo side of things this is one of those places to do just that your social meta is also incredibly useful if we open that up you can simply drop in the url to your facebook page or your twitter username so you can link that through as well hit the save changes and you are all good to go and we're going to leave it pretty much there for now because i want to move on to the next stage which is showing you how you can start to optimize and set up the seo for a page and then you can take these skills and knowledge and start to optimize your entire site with that knowledge in hand now we're ready to take all the work that we've done in rank math seo and start setting up our posts to get the best chance of ranking for the particular keywords that we want now this is a new blog this is a new sample site so i'm going to show you on a post that i've written and i'm going to show you how everything works but before we jump in there let me quickly draw your attention to this new section we've got on the right hand side called seo details it tells us a couple of different things it'll rank out of 100 the actual score of our particular page as you can see currently there's nothing set up on there because we haven't started to configure the seo of this we've then got the keyword that's been set for this particular postal page the schema in other words what type of content is this page all about and setting up a schema can be very useful to get what are called rich snippets now rich snippets come in different formats but you can see we've got various different things that enhance these different listing items so things like a star rating we've also got things then like the essential which is a rich snippet telling us that this is the price and what you kind of get it's useful piece of information if you can start to get these as part of your search results it enhances not only the search result but also should generally improve your ability to get a good click through because extra information is being displayed so that's kind of useful to have as part of any of your listings so aiming for those is very useful now coming back we've also got some extra options like the number of links that are included in our post external and internal linking again very useful thing so when you have a larger blog or website and you want to interlink to various different sections or pages throughout your site to make everything just a little bit more usable so it's good you can see these various different informational pieces as part of this seo details on the right hand side now once we've sort of ready to go and start editing we're going to open up this particular post once you've done that we're going to take a look at the right hand section and inside there you can see right at the top we get this little red option that tells us our current ranking in other words we've got 11 out of 100 so a pretty poor ranking score right now however we've also got a lot of different options on how we can enhance that and get a much better result the first and probably most important thing we need to do is to choose the focus keyword now don't be confused by thinking keyword as in singular you can put in more than one keyword you can have a short phrase and that's what we're going to use then to check the content on the site the description the title all those things for how relevant this article is and how well it feels it'll rank as part of google for that particular search term now when you're looking for focus keywords it's very useful to do a search beforehand to make sure that that is a search term that is being searched for and also isn't totally saturated making it a lot more difficult for your post or page to start ranking search engines like google now thankfully there are some very useful tools that help you find keywords that are not over saturated and also are keywords or phrases that are actually being searched for on search engines like google and that's called keywords every way and you can use a nice free little browser extension to link that through and we can see that right at the top this little keywords everywhere now what i need to do is search for a keyword or phrase that i think is relevant to the article i'm writing in this example it's elementor pro and we're going to do is we're going to hit enter on there and that will tell me right at the top of the volume of searches per month for that particular keyword phrase and also how much competition i would have searching for that so you can see there's on average 49 500 searches per month and we see the competition is fairly low and if you find something that's a little bit over saturated you can also use this extra piece of information on the right hand side this part of keywords everywhere called related keywords and this will allow you to see other keyword phrases that are close to what you've just typed in that you may have a better chance of ranking for so you can see things like elementor pro discount element or free and so on and we also have people also search for these other phrases so this is incredibly useful information when you're looking to set up a keyword or keyword phrase to make sure that your article is going to rank for that particular topic so just one of those useful little tools that i would highly recommend you use to see exactly how much chance you have for ranking for any particular article so you don't waste time trying to rank for the wrong kinds of keywords in a very saturated market so now i've done my basic research on my keyword i'm simply going to add that into rank math on the right hand side we're going to drop that inside there and choose elementor pro for this example and you can see that's now going to start ranking our article based upon that keyword phrase and you can see just by dropping that in there now we've raised that from 11 out of 100 to 74 out of 100. so what exactly is this all doing well if we take a look underneath you can see we've got four different tabs our basic seo additional and so on so basic seo you can see we are looking green text on all of those we're looking good for pretty much everything we've got the keyword is inside the seo title in the meta description it's used in the url and so on and so forth so this gives us tangible information that if anything has not been shown as a green tick we can't easily come in and configure things to make sure that we get the best chance of ranking for that particular keyword or phrase we then have a couple of extra features which we can check and correct any errors that we think are going to be detrimental to our particular seo on this particular page or post open that up you can see with green ticks on four or five of these options but we do have a couple of options inside you a couple of pieces of information that we're not doing too well on link out to external resources one of those things that's incredibly easy to rectify all we need to do is come into our article look for something that's relevant to an external link in this example elementor so what i can do is i can highlight that and i can just add a url inside there and we're going to just put in the url to elementor and we'll set that up and we just configure that then to be anything we want like opening a new tab for example and we're looking good in there and you can see now that improves our ranking one more time we now only have one red x inside this section and again our rank has risen up to 80 out of 100 so you can work through these various different things to make sure that you're getting the optimal level to get the best possible search results so that section is incredibly useful for making sure you fine-tune everything to meet as many criteria as possible it's not always to get 100 even though that's the optimal way of working sometimes there's just things that you can't do to get that perfect score but the aim is to get as high as possible while retaining a very well written page or post on your website but what else do we have inside here well you can see right at the top we get this preview and this is exactly what our snippet is going to look like in a search result as part of google or any other kind of search engine but we can't edit that if we want to we can say edit the snippet and from there we can now configure the title the purple link that's going to be used and the description so making sure you craft something that's relevant to the post that you're writing or the page you're writing and that's the key thing make sure it is relevant because the last thing you ever want to do is create content that's about one thing and then you set up the title the permalink and the description about something different the search engines are smart enough to know exactly what you're doing and all you're doing is getting penalized which ultimately could end up with your site being penalized overall for doing negative things for the search engine side so make sure that everything is relevant to exactly what this page or post is about so let's take a quick look at our preview and how things are going to show up inside our search results now you see at the moment it's not really that great so we can do a lot to refine this what's happening let's just take a look at this preview first you can see it's pulling the title from well basically making the title up from this particular structure the title the separator and the site name so what is elementor pro is the name of this particular post and my wordpress is the name of my particular site however it's very easy to change that you can if you want to completely wipe that out and drop in your own custom title so i've already created a title which i can drop inside there and you can see now that pulls that up and replaces the default constructed preview title that we have however you can still do that if you want to you can change the structure of that or you can mix and match both methods so at the moment we put our own custom title in as you can see it's 42 characters long out of a maximum of recommended of 60 characters so it's worth taking note of these and also taking note of this little indicator to show you how close to the green mark you're getting what we can do like i say is we can mix and match these if we want to so i can come up and i can just choose from these options and you can see we've got things like site title site description current date first file name counter and so on so if you want to you can mix and match these so we can say we'll have the site title in there and you can see that now updates to it says what is elementor pro and what does it cost and then my wordpress and we can also do things like drop in that separator so we can just simply make a bit of space inside there come back up we'll do a little search at the top for the separator if we don't see it drop that inside there and if you want to we can just reorder those and put them where we need them and as you can see that automatically updates everything inside there gets us closer to that 60 character limit and we're getting closer to that green check mark but it's entirely up to you how you want to build these up i'm going to remove those from there for now now the permalink if you don't know what the permalink is that's basically just the url to this particular article and it's very useful to have your keyword inside there so you can see we've got what is elementor pro elementor pro is our keyword our focus keyword so we cannot highlight it inside the title we've got it as part of the actual permalink and again you can see it's highlighted and also where it's pulled in what it considers to be the description which is just taken from the first sentence or paragraph from our particular page or post you can see elementor pro features in there however again it's not a very good description so again i've already created a custom description which i'm going to drop inside there and you can see that now gets as much closer to what we want which is that green check mark so we've got 151 out of 160 characters we've got elemental probe in our focus keyword right at the beginning of that however as long as it's inside your description and as close to the beginning as possible you are going to get benefits from it now when it comes to search engine optimization try not to start stuffing keywords to do with your focus keyword into every single aspect of your site or for this page i should say so you don't want to put it in multiple times in the description once in the title once in the permalink and once in the description should generally be more than enough to give you a good result but there we go that's how we can set this up and you can see our preview now actually makes a lot of sense if someone was searching they saw this it would tell them exactly what this is all about next up we've got the social option if we jump out of that you can see this allows us to set up exactly what to look like on both facebook and twitter so by default it's pulling in the featured image for the image we're going to use as part of this and again it's putting in the details from our general section but we can if we want to change those as well so we come down you can see we can add custom image in today if we wanted to we can change the title change the description add an icon overlay on the thumbnail whatever you want to do because obviously when it comes to facebook you can have more than that limit of characters more than you could have on twitter so it might make sense to have just a little bit more information and the same goes for twitter but you can customize this to get exactly what you want and customize the whole look and feel of the various different aspects of both facebook and twitter and i would encourage you to spend a little bit of time doing just that because then when you share or other people share your page or post you've got control over exactly what's going to be seen when they share it on facebook or twitter which could be great for your seo results okay so we say we're happy with all that and again we are looking pretty good our preview is looking great and we've also got a couple of things i want to just draw your attention to before we move on we have an option underneath focus keyword for this post is pillar content what exactly is pillar content and why should you want to use it without getting into too much detail pillar content is the basis with a topic cluster in other words let's just say we were talking about elementor pro and we wanted to do things like how much does it cost what is it for when to use it a comparison and we had pages or posts written on each one of those in more details but we wanted to use this pillar content to have an abbreviated version of each of those linking off to each of the individual pages or posts that have more detail we could set this up as pillar content that would then tell the search engines and google's results and so on to put links to those as part of the actual results you get in google search results so it's very very useful if you create that type of content to identify it as part of your seo strategy and set this up as a pillar content post if it's applicable and you just simply check the box to specify this is pillar content so again when you're creating content for your seo strategy it's worthwhile taking the time to go through and structure your postings to make sure that you can have pillar content that then links out to those relevant different posts to give you a good search engine content strategy so just bear that in mind when you are creating content so next on our to-do list is the schema for this particular post and we come out to this new tab and from there we can set things up now if you're wondering what schema is it's a kind of metadata or referred to as micro data that's added to your site to give the search engines more information about what's going on on this particular post or page and can be very useful when you want to get rich snippets like we spoke about earlier on in this particular video now you can work this in much the same way as we saw earlier on we can choose the headline and description structure by using those simple short codes but we also choose the schema type now you can see we can choose between a range of different schema types and obviously making sure you pick the right schema type for the postal page that you've created is incredibly important so is this an article a book a course or event so on making sure that we choose the right thing inside you can be very useful so this is an article so we're going to leave that as article then we've got the headline and description structures now as you can see it's using the little short shortcode options and again we've got all the shortcuts like we saw we could set up the title the description and so on as part of you know the wordpress post itself and again if you want to you can easily just change this and put your own items inside there you don't have to use any shortcodes you can drop these in yourself so i'm going to replicate the same information that i've used previously for the description and the headline for this particular post then you've got the article type now you can see we can choose between article blog post and a news article now this isn't a news article because this isn't newsworthy it could be an article or it could be a blog post but you'll see there's a little warning saying that google doesn't allow a person as the publisher for articles so you'll need to bear that in mind when you're choosing the article type now before we close out the schema options i want to show you something else because you chose an article we've got a very short simple set of options however if we chose something different we'll get different options in other words it's context based and we supply different information for different types of schema obviously it's beyond the scope of what i want to cover in this video this is a beginner's video but you should be able to fill out most of the data inside this because it is pretty self-explanatory so for example if what we were writing about was a book and we choose that you can see we now get different options things like the url to the book the author the rating a range of different options again if we choose something like music you can see we get music type we've also got the url to it and so on and so forth so recipe for example a restaurant for example the address and location so filling out the relevant data for whatever this particular postal page is about with regards to the schema can be incredibly important for how that information will be added to your listings in the search engines let's just set that back to article and leave it as it is on there and we'll just quickly update our page to make sure that everything is saved before we move on okay so that's the basics of how you can set up rank math let's just go back to the options inside you under the general tab and take a look at some of these extra options and some of the errors that we have and how and if we can actually rectify those like i said earlier in the video not everything is relevant to what you're actually creating a page or post about so for example underneath the additional couldn't find any internal links to your content so let me just show you quickly how you can set up an internal link and we'll then remove that error now i don't really have much content on this site but the method is exactly the same no matter what you want to do so let's just say we're going to use this little section right here to make as a link we'll choose the link option and from there we can now start typing in exactly what we want to look for and there we go there's a post that i'm going to link this through to and we'll just say we want to apply that and that now disappears and you can see our score also goes up so that's how easy it is to create internal links and internal links are incredibly important especially like i said earlier if you're creating pillar content you'd be linking out to articles that are part of your site itself but going through this checklist and we're relevant making the changes to get your scores close to 100 as possible can be incredibly useful let's take a look at the title readability for example as you can see it says your title doesn't contain a positive or negative sentiment word you could change the title if you wanted to in this example i don't really think i need to because my title says what i need it to do but you could change that and it's something that's part of the writing process that can be very useful the same thing goes for your title doesn't contain a power word add at least one so you can take a look at what power words are for example so you can see we've got help throughout the entire setup process for each of our pages and posts and we can go through and find out exactly what we want to use so types of power words for example seductive power words emotional and you can see we've got a range of examples that we can use on there now i'm not going to change anything but you could obviously take your time to refine anything you create and finally we've also got the content readability so it says use a table of contents to break down your text again can be incredibly useful for longer articles and something you may want to place at the top bearing in mind it should always go at the top of your entire article however we're going to leave it there because i've covered the things that i want to cover so now when i hit update you can see we've taken our score from i think it started at about 11 out of 185 out of 100 so we've got a really good starting point now for our particular post we can come back out of this and you can see now that's updated in the right hand column also tells us the keyword the schema how many internal and external links that may be linked as part of this particular post now that i've covered the basics of using rank math for your seo you have all the key skills to start ranking your wordpress websites much higher in the search engine results another massive influencing factor for ranking your website is the speed in which it loads and if you want to learn how to improve that be sure to check out this video on using wp rocket and bunny cdn to get fast load insights in a matter of minutes now if you enjoyed this video be sure to hit that subscribe button and smash the bell icon if you found the content useful hit that thumbs up button and if you didn't feel that well you can hit the thumbs down button twice because that seems to work pretty well too as always my name paul c this has been wp tetson until next time take care

Channel: WPTuts

Views: 13,665

Keywords: WPTuts, wordpress seo 2020, wordpress seo 2020 easy on-page seo for wordpress, wordpress seo, wordpress seo plugin, wordpress seo tutorial, wordpress seo tutorial for beginners, seo wordpress, wordpress plugins, wordpress plugins for seo, wordpress tutorial, must have wordpress plugins, top wordpress plugins, rank math, rank math setup, search engine optimization, rank math seo, rankmath, rank math seo plugin tutorial, rank math tutorial 2020

Id: d6v0gkEoqII

Length: 30min 19sec (1819 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 22 2020