A few days ago I explained to you the wonders that Rank Math SEO can do for your WordPress Site, on a blog-post named “Rank Math (part 1): Why you need this all-in-one SEO Plugin for WordPress“. If you are kinda convinced about transitioning to work with it, on this post I am going to show you the 5 easy steps that you need to follow in order to install it and start working.
1st step: Is your website compatible with Rank Math SEO?
First of all, what this plugin will do is check if your website is compatible with the minimum of requirements that Rank Math SEO does need in order to work properly and give you the better experience and results.
2nd step: Set up on Rank Math SEO what is your website about
When you have checked that your Site is compatible with the minimum configuration that Rank Math SEO does require, you need to make sure to check your website onto the right category of what it is going to be about (for example, personal blog or an ecommerce platform).
AND, as the last Google Algorithm update have freed yourself up to, you can upload your favicon and the image that the Social Media platform would choose per default to share the content of your website.
3rd step: Configure your Google Search Console to cross data with Rank Math
Configure the advanced options that do allow you to connect the Google Search Console (GSC) of your website with Rank Math SEO. This way, you are going to be able to work with a “native” data-screen of GSC onto your WordPress, thanks to Rank Math.
Once you have set this up you will be provided with a very intuitive interface that will give you information (and graphics and charts) about the basics that you can get an easy glimpse when entering onto your own Console, but also a more in-depth data that is easier to analyze with: Click history, Impressions History, CTR History, Position History, Search Analysis, Sitemaps, Keyword Tracking, and Search Analysis
4th step: Set up how you want your Sitemaps be generated with Rank Math
With Rank Math you can go one step further from the options you may have been familiar with the Premium Yoast SEO Sitemaps.xml options.
First of all (obviously), you can choose if you want them to be created or not. And you can choose if you want the Search Engines of Bing and Google to be able to automatically ping the content when the Sitemap does refresh.
If you do activate the Sitemaps, you will be able to choose what type of “content” (URL) you do want to be at the sitemaps:
- Posts.
- Pages.
- Media.
- Exclude ID or terms of those posts that you do not want to be included at the Sitemaps
- Authors/Users to be a part of the crawled content of your Site: Admin, Authors, Subscribers, Editors and/or Contributors.
- Taxonomies: of categories and tags.
5th step: Optimize the Meta Robots of your Rank Math SEO configuration
At the last screen of the configuration of this All-In-One SEO plugin, you are going to be able to automatize and choose the general options for the Meta Robots of your posts (but, disclaimer: you can edit all these options at the “Advanced” tab of the Rank Math SEO box of each post).
Meta Robots: Index or NoIndex, NoFollow, with or without Snippet, index the Images and/or the Archives that are at the post.
Define the Canonical URL, as well as point if the piece of content needs to be Redirected to another URL. *This information will connect to the “Redirections” module so all the data is collected on one place and later you can download all of these guidelines and apply directly to your .htaccess without having to work everything through a plugin for these directives.
And… YOU ARE DONE! Have fun optimizing your website SEO variables through the integrated options (and kinda side-plugins that Rank Math does have working for itself), so your results at the SERPS show up as the better they can be. 🙂
