The Ideal Rank Math SEO Plugin Settings

Rank Math is a great SEO plugin developed by MyThemeShop. It comes with awesome features that improve your website SEO. Since anyone can now use the Rank Math SEO plugin on their site. In this tutorial, I’m going to share the Rank Math SEO settings.

If you want to use Rank Math SEO Plugin on your site, then you can easily setup Rank Math SEO plugin on your site by following this article.

So, let's get started Rank Math SEO Settings...

How to Configure Rank Math SEO Plugin Settings

The setup of Rank Math SEO plugin is very easy. It gives a setup wizard so that beginners can easily configure the Rank Math SEO plugin on your site.

First, install and activate Rank Math SEO plugin on your site. After the plugin is activated, it will welcome you from the setup wizard.

Here is the step by step guide for Rank Math SEO Plugin Settings.

1. Dashboard

If you have already installed Rank Math and again want setup wizard then just click on the Dashboard >> Setup Wizard.

Once the setup wizard starts, Here you will see the setup initiation screen. You can screenshot below,

It also checks your website compatibility. If there is an error, click on the More button to see it.

Once you’re ready, click on “Start Wizard” button.

a. Your Site

Here, you will need to enter some information for your site such as type of website, logo.

Since you can choose website type according to your website.

• Personal Blog
• Personal Portfolio
• Other Personal Website
• Small Business Site
• Other Business Website

Then click on the Save and Continue button.

b. Search Console

In this page, you can connect your site from Google Search Console tool to see crawl error notifications, keyword statistics, and other important information in your WordPress dashboard. You can read this article from MyThemeShop to connect your site to the Google Search Console.

c. Sitemap

Sitemap helps search engines index your content properly. On this page, you can select which type of posts or pages you want to include in your Sitemaps. Just follow screenshot to configure it.

d. Optimization

e. Ready

Here, it will congratulate with "Your site is ready".

f. Setup Advanced Options

This option will appear on the Ready page at the bottom in the right side. Just click on it.

Now, it will take you to the Advance option page. Just enable 404 Monitor and Redirection option.

• 404 Monitor - It allows you to see if visitors or search engines get any 404 Not Found error on your site.
• Redirections - It allows you to easily redirect 404 URLs (temporary or permanent redirections) to your site.

This was the easiest and fastest way to configure Rank Math SEO plugin settings but it was basic settings.

Here, we will configure the Rank Math advance setting.

2. General settings

Just click on Rank Math >> General settings. Here you will see some advanced settings for your site.

a. Link

• Strip Category Base - make your URLs clean and short, you can use to strip the category name from the URLs. If you turn on it, the URLs look like this,

example.com/category/my-category/ becomes example.com/my-category 

• Redirect Attachments - This redirects attachment page URLs to posts where they attach.
• Redirect Orphan Media - Leave it default.
• Remove Stopwords from Permalinks - It removes stopwords such as a, and, the, etc from your site's URL and makes clean and short. It only affects the auto-generated URLs for newly created posts and pages.
• Nofollow External Links - You can set the Nofollow tag for external domains with one click. But I do not recommend it.
• Nofollow Image File Links - It automatically adds rel="nofollow" attribute for external image files.
• Nofollow Domains - If you enter the domains in this box, then it will set Nofollow for those domains. Search engines will not follow them.
• Nofollow Exclude Domains - This option will not set up Nofollow for the link if target domain in this list.
• Open External Links in New Tab/Window - This option helps reduce your site's bounce rate. It automatically adds target="_blank" attribute for external links appearing in your posts, pages. When the visitors click the link, the link will open in a new window or tab.

b. Images

It improves your image search result by optimizing your image. There are many bloggers who forget to add ALT attributes to their images. But Rank Math SEO Plugin automatically add missing ALT attributes.

Also, you can choose a format from the drop-down menu for your title attribute. You can see screenshot below.

c. Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs help users to know where they are on your site and as well as help search engines to understand your site structure. With rank math, you can customize breadcrumbs at an advanced level.

• Separator Character - You can select separator (-) between breadcrumb items.
• Show Homepage Link - Enable or disable Homepage Link in the breadcrumb.
• Homepage label - You can display another name (label) for the home text.
• Hide Post Title - Hide Post title from Breadcrumb.
• Show Category(s) - If a category is a child category, you can hide it or show it. You keep it off.
• Hide Taxonomy Name - Just keep it off.

c. Webmaster Tools

This section allows you to connect your site through Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, Baidu Webmaster Tools, Alexa Verification ID, Yandex Verification ID, Pinterest Verification ID, and Norton Safe Web Verification ID. Just enter verification codes for webmaster tools.

d. Edit robots.txt

With rank math SEO plugin, you can edit your robots.txt file from WordPress dashboard. Currently, leave it default.

e. Edit .htaccess

Like robot.txt file, you can also edit the .htaccess file from the WordPress dashboard without going cPanel. At the moment there is no need to make any changes in this.

f. 404 Monitor

The 404 monitor allows you to see the 404 not found errors URL on your site. Here are some advanced options. Just follow screenshots and configure them.

g. Redirections

• Fallback Behavior - If nothing is found related to the visitor's search, then you can set default 404, Redirect to Homepage or Custom Redirection.
• Redirection Type - You can choose redirection type for your redirect content such as 301 permanent move, 302 temporary move, 401 content deleted etc. We recommend 301 permanent move. Also, you can set Auto Post Redirect, when you change the slug of a post, page, category. You can modify redirection later according to your needs.

h. Search Console

You can authorize Rank Math plugin with your Google Search Console profile to see the most important information directly from Google.

i. Others

This option allows you to make settings for RSS such as Add content before each post in your site feeds and Add content after each post in your site feeds.

3. Title and Meta

This is a most important setting for your blog and website. Here, a small mistake can hurt your ranking.

a. Global Meta

This setting contains SEO titles and meta options. If you make any changes here, it will affect the pages of your entire site. Follow screenshot and configure it.

• Robots Meta - It controls your site indexing.

i).  No Index - Prevent pages from being indexed in search engine result page.

ii). No Archive - Prevents search engine from showing cached links of page

iii). No Snippet - Prevents a snippet from being show in the search result.

iv). No Follow - Prevents search engine from following links on the page.

v). No Image Index - Let you specify that you do not want your page to appear as the referring page for images that appear in image search result.

• Noindex Empty Category and Tag Archives - This setting sets Noindex for empty archives and prevents thin content from being indexed in search engine result page.
• Separator Character - You can use the separator (-) between two words.
• Capitalize Titles - It allows to automatically capitalize the first character of all title tags.

Leave the rest of the settings default.

b. Local SEO

Here, you will need to enter some information for your site. Since you have completed this setting in the Setup Wizard. So do not need to do anything.

c. Social Meta

Here you can add social networks to your site.

d. Homepage

This SEO setting is for your website's homepage. If you want to change the homepage title and homepage meta description. You can here.

Also, you can select custom robots meta for the homepage, such as nofollow, noarchive, No Follow, etc. I recommend to leave it unchecked.

e. Post Formats Archive

Here do not make any changes leave it default.

f. Authors

If you are running a single author blog, keep it disabled. This prevents the author archive pages from indexing in the search engine. Because there is a similar content on the author archive pages and homepage. But if you are running a multi-author blog, then keep it enabled.

g. Misc Pages

h. Posts

These settings affect your single post's Title and Meta settings. Here you can select Article Type, Post Robots Meta and many more. You can see screenshot below.

i. Pages

This setting for a single page.

j. Media

This options for media attachment.

You can configure the robots meta according to your needs, or use our recommended settings

k. Categories

Set noindex for categories. The reason it creates duplicate content issues in search engines. They are only helpful in site navigation.

l. Tags

Like the category, set noindex for the tag. The reason it creates duplicate content issues in search engines. They are only helpful in site navigation.

4. Sitemap Settings

The sitemap contains with your site URLs. It helps the search engine to properly index your content. With Rank math SEO settings, you can setup Links Per Sitemap means a number of links. Also, it allows to add Images and Featured image in the sitemap.

Automatically notify Google and Bing when a sitemap gets updated.

a. Posts

b. Page

c. Categories

d. Tags

5. 404 Monitor

A 404 error occurs when you delete the publishing post or move to another URL. Almost every site has 404 errors. Finding a 404 error is not a difficult task. You can easily fix it with a plugin. But with Rank Math SEO plugin you do not need to any plugin. It monitors 404 error page and helps to fix them.

Just navigate to Rank Math >> 404 Monitor page. If your site has 404 error not found, you will see here. Currently, there is no 404 error in our site, so it is showing "The 404 error log is empty".

6. Redirection

Rank Math comes with built-in redirection manager that helps to get rid of 404 and other errors. If you want to set up redirections for any of your posts, just click on Rank Math >> Redirections and add your new Redirection.

7. Search Console

With Rank Math’s Google Search Console integration, you can see all the important data of your Search Console tool for your site such as average ranking position, click through rate, and ranking keyword in your WordPress admin dashboard.

You can see all the important data of your website in a single place and inside your WordPress admin.

8. Import & Export

This option makes it easy and fast to switch to Rank Math. It has the capability to import your existing SEO settings from your current SEO plugin means does not affect your website SEO.

Also, Rank Math will automatically detect which SEO plugin you’re currently using on your site and allow you to choose which settings you want to import.

Apart from this, you can also import your SEO settings by uploading the file.

It also has the ability to export SEO data into other SEO plugins.

Rank Math comes with many features that you can enable and disable them according to your needs. The best thing is that they have given a description for each module that makes it easier to understand.

Simply click the dashboard >> module and enable and disable the module according to your needs.

If you use AMP on your site, enable AMP model.

Have any thoughts regarding Rank Math SEO Settings? We’d love to hear what you think about it.

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