Rank Math Review: A Free and Premium WordPress SEO

Are you looking for the best SEO plugin for your WordPress site?

We will review the Rank Math SEO plugin, which is a free WordPress SEO plugin.

Recently, it is a plugin that we hear frequently, especially in webmaster forums and on various platforms. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the web world is talking about this plugin.

Those who use the Yoast SEO or All in SEO Pack plugin on their websites, now is the time to switch to the next generation SEO tool, Rank Math.

The most popular WordPress SEO plugins of domestic and foreign sources with 800,000+ downloads in a short time and an evaluation score of 4.9 out of 5.

How to Make Rank Math SEO Settings?

We are going to install and use the WordPress Rank Math SEO Plugin right away. The recommended optimal settings and configuration are included in this section.

Rank Math » Dashboard:

• 404 Monitor: Active

This feature records 404 not found pages that visitors and search engines cannot reach. For user experience, you need to detect these pages, we recommend that you activate them.

• ACF: Passive

If you are using the Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) plugin, enable it. This feature allows RankMath to read and scan content in advanced custom fields.

• AMP: Passive

If any AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) plugin is installed on your website, activate it.

• bbPress: Passive

Provides meta support for the bbPress forum system. Since we do not use any forum modules, we left this setting off.

• BuddyPress: Passive

You are using BuddyPress social networking system, enable it to make pages SEO friendly, meta tag configuration.

• Instant Indexing: Active
  

We are here with the most amazing feature of Rank Math! Activate this feature so that you can get Google Index instantly if content is added or updated on your site.

• Link Counter: Active
  

Let this setting be on for counting internal and external connections.

• Local SEO & Google Knowledge Graph: Active

Enable for structured data markup if you are a local business. Search engines may consider the use of rich schemas as a positive signal.

• Redirections: Active
  

It allows you to get rid of 404 pages. Easily redirect deleted or non-existent content with a 301 status code.

• Schema (Structured Data): Active

Enable for rich search results and support for structured data.

• Role Manager: Passive

Role Manager allows you to control which user groups can change rank math settings and authorization.

• Search Console: Active
  

With Google Search Console integration, you can view important google information and warnings about your website directly in the WordPress admin panel.

• SEO Analysis: Active

With the SEO analysis tool, your on-site optimization process is evaluated comprehensively.

• Sitemap: Active

Activate the internal sitemap module and get rid of external plugin installations.

• WooCommerce: Passive

If you are using the WooCommerce e-commerce module, make sure it is active.

– Help:

Register on RankMath.com with the Activate Now button and activate your license for free.

– Setup Wizard (Quick Setup):

1. On the start screen (Getting Started), click the MORE button next to the text ” Your website is compatible to run Rank Math SEO ” and verify the compatibility of the plugin with your server.
2. On the Your Site (1) screen, select a personal blog or corporate website. Also upload a default image for Google and social shares.
3. On the Search Console (2) screen, make your website associate with Google Search Console.
4. Turn on the “ Sitemaps ” and “ Include Images ” features to generate a sitemap including images from the Sitemap (3) screen . From the selection area, tick Posts, Pages, Categories.
5.  On the Optimization (4) screen Noindex Empty Category and Tag ArchivesSet the option to ON so that empty tags and categories will be closed to the index. By turning Nofollow External Links and Open External Links in New Tab/Window options On, you enable external external links to be opened in a new tab with rel=nofollow tag.
6. Installation finished successfully. On the result screen, you will display a site-wide SEO score.  Enable auto update of the plugin: Turn off automatic plugin updates. Proudly Show the SEO Score to Your Visitors: hide the SEO score from visitors with the off setting.

– Import & Export:

You can move all the settings you use in Yoast SEO and All in SEO Pack plugins by importing them into this plugin.

For this, it will be enough to click all the options in the Plugin Importers field and say import.

You can also back up your settings with the export process.

Rank Math » General Settings

<>– Links:

• Strip Category Base: On

Set it to On to remove the /category/ prefix found in categories’ permalinks (URL).

• Redirect Attachments: On

It directs the attachment pages to the article where the media file is located. Thus, a visitor who clicks on your website from Google Images will not view the media file directly, but will be directed to the relevant content.

• Redirect Orphan Attachments: https://advisewp.com
  

If the file attachment is not linked to any page, it will be redirected to the home page. In this field you need to enter the full URL of your website.

• Remove Stopwords from Permalinks: Off

You can prevent certain words (like and, or, one) from appearing in permalinks.

• Nofollow External Links: On
  

Enable to automatically add NoFollow tag to external links.

• Nofollow Image File Links: On
  

Turn on to add a nofollow tag to external image links.

• Nofollow Domains

Leave this field blank.

• Nofollow Exclude Domains

Do not apply the nofollow tag to desired websites. You may want to give dofollow links to authoritative sites such as Facebook, Google, Wikipedia. (Please enter a site address in the format site-address.com on each line, it should not contain http(s) and www!)

• Open External Links in New Tab/Window: On

Again, if you want external links (external links) to open in a new tab, activate it. Thus, you can prevent possible loss of visitors due to link clicks.

– Images:

• Add missing ALT attributes: On

Adds an alt tag in the following format to images that don’t have an alt tag.

• >Subattribute format:%title% %count(alt)% – %filename%

The alt tag is populated using the post title and file name. You can use this template for SEO benefit.

• Add missing TITLE attributes: On
  

Adds an alt tag in the following format to images that do not have a title tag.

• Title attribute format:   %title% %count(title)% – %focuskw%
  

Creates the image title tag based on the post title and the focused word.

– Breadcrumbs:

• Creates a navigation menu with links for subpages (“Home > Category > Post”).
• If your theme does not have this feature, you can use it.
• All settings can remain as default.
• You need to add the code to your theme file .

+ You can verify the website for search engines from the Webmaster Tools section. We recommend that you do not touch the robots.txt and .htaccess sections.

– Others:

• Usage Tracking: Off

If you do not want to allow the plugin to collect data from your website, turn it Off.

• Show SEO Score: Off

If you do not want to show the SEO score of the page to the users, turn it Off.

You can leave the RSS Before Content and RSS After Content fields blank.

– 404 Monitors:

• Mode: Simple

Simply select the simple mode for error logging. Advanced mode causes high resource consumption.

• Log Limit: 100

Sets the maximum number of rows in the log. Default can stay at the default value.

• Exclude Paths

You can stop registration of some URL indexes or pages containing selected words. (Contains = containing, Exact = complete)

• Ignore Query Parameters: Off
  

Mark off to ignore url query paremeters (the part after the question mark) while recording.

– Redirections:

• Debug Redirections: Off

You may not want to keep advanced and complex logs.

• Fallback Behavior: Default 404
  

Show visitors the default 404 page if the target URL cannot be detected.

• Redirection Type: 301

Google and other search engines recommend a 301 redirect code.

• Auto Post Redirect: On
  

If you change the URL of a page or post, it will automatically create a 301 redirect from the old link to the new link.

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Rank Math » Titles & Meta

– Global Meta:

• Robots Meta:

It is recommended that you do not select any of the meta robots tags here. To set the default meta robots value

• Advanced Robots Meta: -1 -1 Large

You can enter these values ​​in order. You can turn off the restriction for the featured snippet in search engines.

• Noindex Empty Category and Tag Archives: ON

Assigns noindex tag to tag and category archives that do not contain text.

• Separator Character

You can specify the special character to be placed between the post title and the site title.

• Capitalize Titles: Off
  

Capitalizes the first characters of the words in the title. (this is a post > This is a post)

• OpenGraph Thumbnails

Upload a featured default image if pages without images are shared on Facebook. (Recommended image size is 1200 x 630 pixels)

• Twitter Card Type: Summary Card with Large Image
  

Creates a meta card with a large image for Twitter posts.

– Local SEO:

• Person or Company: Select Personal and Company.
• Name: Enter the company name or site name.
• Logo: Upload a minimum 160x90px logo.
• URL: Type your full URL that points to your homepage.

– Social Meta:

Identify your website’s social media links or usernames to display on Knowledge Graph cards.

– Homepage :

• Specify the title and meta description tags for your homepage.
• Homepage Robots Meta: It can stay as Default.
• You can also specify a title, meta description, and image for Facebook.

– Authors:

• Author Archives: On

You can disable author pages, but it is recommended to enable it for the Google search engine’s EAT ( Expertise, Competence, Credibility ) signal. If you disable it, the author archives will be redirected to your home page.

• Author Base: /author/

Specify a prefix for author pages. (in the format advisewp.com/author/admin)

• Author Robots Meta: Custom

Let’s edit the meta tags of the author pages as we specified.

• Author Robots Meta: NoIndex

We can close the index by clicking the No Index option.

• Author Advanced Robots
• Author Archive Title
• Author Archive Description
• Add SEO Meta Box for Users

These settings do not matter, as the index will be closed. You can leave it as default.

– Misc Pages:

This is the section that contains important tweaks. Noindex configuration must be done correctly for crawl budget optimization.

• Date Archives: Off

Turn it off to avoid creating archive pages by date. Keeping this feature turned on will result in poor content and unnecessary indexing.

• Search Results Title:   %search_query% Search Results %page%

It is the title format to be used in search pages.

• 404 Title: Page Not Found – Advise WP

Edit the header for 404 pages. Type your site name where it says AdviseWP.

• Noindex Search Results: On

Set the search pages made within the site as noindex.

• Noindex Paginated Pages: On

Turn off successor pages (like /page/2/) for indexing.

• Noindex Archive Subpages: On
  

Close the successor pages of the archives for indexing.

• Noindex Password Protected Pages: ten

Prevent subpages with password protection from being indexed by search engines.

 Posts / Pages:

The settings of the posts and pages section are exactly the same. The only difference is that you can select Article Type: Article for pages.

• Single Post Title:   %title% – Site Name
  

It is the default title format for posts.

• Single Post Description:    %excerpt% 

Pulls the default meta description for posts from the content.

• You can set Schema Type: Article. It makes structured data markup for your blog posts.
• Headline and Description sections can remain by default. ( %seo_title% and %seo_description% )
• Article Type: We recommend setting it to Blog Post. Science-based blog sites can mark as Article and news site owners can mark as News Article.
• Post Robots Meta: Can be left as Default
• Link Suggestions: You can request that the suggested links related to the content be listed while adding a post by setting it on. (Must be Link Suggestion Titles: Titles)
• Finally, set Primary Taxonomy: Categories and Add SEO Meta Box: On and Bulk Editing: Enabled.

 You do not need to touch the settings in the Attachments, Categories, and Tags tab.

Instant Indexing Settings:

Perhaps the best part of the Rank Math SEO plugin! You can use the Google API for instant indexing of your content.

[1] Google API Setup:

•  Download the “fast-indexing-api” plugin from the Rankmath.com site ( here ).
•  Follow the Google API Console link and create a new project.
•  If you’ve encountered the API enabled screen, it’s fine, don’t click on anything external.

[2] Creating a Google Service Account:

• Access the Service Account Creation page and select the project you just created in the Select a project sectionandclick “Open”.
• Now you can click on the “ + CREATE SERVICE ACCOUNT ” link next to the Service accounts text .
• In the name of the service account, we write AdviseWP (your site name) and click create.
• From the Choose a role field, follow the “ Project > Owner” step, then click the continue button below.
• Press the “ +CREATE KEY ” button without touching anything and download the .json file to your computer by saying create as JSON .
• Go to the Service Accounts screen by saying Done .
• Write down the e-mail address (in the format site-name@ace-agility-250604.iam.gserviceaccount.com, we will use this e-mail address in the future!)

[3] Google Search Console Authorization:

1.  Select your website via Google Search Console and go to the Settings section at the bottom of the left panel .
2.  Click once on Users and permissions .
3. Press the ellipsis  next to your name and say Manage property owners .
4. Click on the Add Owner button at the bottom of  the screen that opens in the new tab .
5.  You must enter the e-mail address that we noted in the blank field.
6.  The process is complete…

[4] Configuration of Plugin:

• Open the downloaded json file with notepad and copy all the lines.
• From the WordPress Admin Panel, follow the Rank Math » Instant Indexing » Settings step.
• Paste the text we copied into the JSON Key field and save the changes.
• Go to the Console tab above and perform a test with the Send to API .
• Good luck, the transaction went smoothly.

Why RankMath?

• It is completely free and constantly updated.
• You can get technical support 24/7.
• Compatible with the latest google algorithms and innovations.
• The most comprehensive SEO Plugin (Includes all standard features such as built-in sitemap, SEO compatible content creation assistant, site-wide SEO analysis, etc.)
• Click for Rank Math vs Yoast SEO comparison chart !

Rank Math SEO includes all the features in Yoast SEO Premium version. In addition to these, it has the following differences;

• It supports rich schemas such as BlogPost and Article.
• It ensures that external links are opened in a new tab with the nofollow tag.
• Images are assigned alt and title tags.
• Automatic 301 redirect after URL change available in Yoast SEO Premium.
• Internal link suggestion based on content in post editor.
• Monitoring 404 pages from users.
• With the Google Index API, new content is indexed instantly.

It is the end of the article. You can use the comment section for your opinions and support.

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