Rank Math SEO Tutorial 2023 | A Step-by-Step Guide to Setup Rank Math
In this video we will be using Rank Math
to optimize your entire WordPress website. Let me show you what we'll be covering in
this tutorial. I'm gonna show you how to set up Rank Math properly in the right way. We're
gonna talk about all the options and settings in this extensive plugin. I'm also going to show
you how to set up Social Sharing the images and the texts. We're going to talk about all the
modules like Redirection, Sitemaps, Schema markup, the 404 Monitor and we're going to optimize an
entire landing page, so you know how to get those green check marks and rank your website in the
search engines. We're also going to talk about the Content AI from Rank Math and I'm gonna teach you
everything about Titles, Site Titles, Separators and Meta Descriptions, so you know how to work
with it.
Let's optimize your website right now. Login to your WordPress website. If you're still
logging in using /wp-admin/… that's not a very safe way, so please watch my tutorial
about securing your WordPress website, because you don't want to get hacked! On the left
side we go to 'Plugins' over here and we're gonna press 'Add new'. Look for the plugin Rank Math and
here we have Rank Math SEO. Press 'Install now'. It's the best WordPress SEO plugin. Actually
not exaggerated, it is the best WordPress SEO plugin right now! We press on activate over
here. Now you actually want to have a free account because you get keywords suggestions
directly from Google. Press 'Connect your account'. And you can log into Facebook, Googl,
WordPress.com or use email and password. And if you cannot log in you can choose to 'Register
now' over here. Click on it. Use email address, and we're gonna add our name. And we're going
to click on continue and register. And then we press on 'Activate now'.
Welcome to the Rank Math
Setup Wizard. We're going to choose the advanced version of course. And we're gonna press 'Start
Wizard'. Rank Math can import SEO settings from other SEO plugins that you have been using before.
If you don't have one, you don't see this at all. If you do have it, press 'Start Import'. And then
we're going to press 'Continue'. The first thing we need to configure is "What is this website?".
Pick the category that fits your website best. As this is a website completely about apartments,
this is gonna be a 'Business Website'. So we're gonna choose 'Small Business Site'. Now what for
business type do we have? Organization, Airline… well in this case we're talking about real estate.
And the website name is the name of your website. In our case Alphabet Apartments.
Just fill in
your name of your website or your organization. If you have a alternate name like an acronym or
shorter name, just fill it in over there. We don't have it, so I'm going to leave this empty. Then we
have a personal organization name or your company name in Google's knowledge panel. We want this to
be Alphabet Apartments. Then we have a logo for Google. The minimum size is this, and of course
it should be a squared image. This is preferred by search engines.
We're gonna look if we have a
logo which is actually square. Let me see. This is not Square. Press upload select my files. A nice
square image. And let's change the alt text- very important. We press use this file. Mow we have
a beautiful squared image which is preferred by search engines. Then we have a social share image.
If you share your website on WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook or any social media platform then this
image shows up if you haven't specified a image per post or page. It is the standard image.
The recommended size is 1200 by 630 so we're gonna create a beautiful picture for this one.
Add or upload file… here we go. Upload file, and then we have a beautiful image 1200 by 630.
Use this file. In this image make sure to promote your business, so what do you do? Well my client
rents Apartments, so and I've chosen for this beautiful apartment and their logo inside of it,
and also the deep purple color from their website. If you have added this press save and continue.
No worry's if you don't have an image right now, you can always fill this in later.
Then we're
going to connect Google services, which is really important because now it will automatically
connect your site with Google Search Console and also Google analytics. Why is this useful? Well
it will submit sitemaps automatically. So we're gonna press 'Connect Google Services'. Sign in
with Google or choose your Google account. And then we're just gonna enable Rank Math to do all
these things. Scroll down and press continue. Now it might take a while, but then you will see your
website over here. alphabetapartments.com very good. My client already has another company called
Greenstay, which are other apartments and now we're gonna add a property to Google analytics.
So we're
gonna press 'Create new GA4 property' over there press OK. And then we have a new property called
Alphabet. Then we have data stream called website really great, sorRank Math really configures Google
Analytics all ready for you, so that is amazing. And we're gonna press on 'Install analytics code'.
And then we're gonna exclude logged in users which is really important, or else your Google
analytics data will be filled with your own visits. And that's not the point of analytics isn't
it? All right do you want email reports yes or no? Yes I want it, so press save and continue. Over to
the Sitemaps. Now this is very important because sitemaps are being sent out to the search engine
so they know what pages or posts to index or not. Make sure sitemaps are enabled. Make sure images
are included. Now what do you have on your website? On this site we don't have posts, we don't have
projects we only have pages. But maybe in your case you have posts or pages, so just enable them
what you have on your website.
If you don't know if you have posts, just go to your dashboard in a new
tab, go to 'Posts' 'All posts' and you can see if you have posts. In my case I don't have posts. The same
with projects, go to 'All projects' and you can see we don't have projects on this website. We have
84 pages on this website. we definitely want to send pages in our XML sitemap. But no posts and no
projects. Then if you're using categories, project categories, project tags, or types you should select
them. Or in my case, not select them because I don't have them on this website. If you're using
categories however for your blog etc. just enable this one to also include it in your sitemap.
Press save and continue.
A little bit SEO tweaking no-index empty category and tag archives very
important to keep this on. Nofollow external links, you should keep this off or else your website is a
dead end. Because nofollow external links will tell Google bot to not follow links that go off your
website. But that means your website is a dead end on the internet. And nobody likes a dead end in the
street! No sir! Open external links in a new tab, keep this on. Because when you link out to another
website your visitor is actually gone and if you open them in a new tab, the chances are that they
will be returned to your website.
Press save and continue. The basics are ready now, but we're going
to set up 'Advanced Options'. Click on it. Then we have the role manager, which is a really powerful
feature. If you are the only person on your website to actually make changes, then you should turn the
entire role manager off. Because you're the only one and you can do everything already. However, if
you do have for example editors on your website and authors, that are contributing to the content
on your website, you can turn this on and off what they actually can do on your website.
But on this
website we don't have any other users than me and my client who are both administrators so we're
gonna disable the Role Manager entirely. Press save and continue. Then we have the 404 monitors. A
powerful feature which I really like. Enable this one, it will show you when visitors come from the
search engine and they actually bump into a 404 page which is not good of course. And also with
Rank Math comes the redirections tool. Really useful, so now you don't have to use another plugin
to do this for you. So enable this one and press save and continue. Schema markup keep this enabled,
because it will add metadata to your website so you will get rich Snippets and more traffic to
your website. Now let's configure this. If you have posts on your website, then what kind of schema
type should we be using? Just choose the one that fits best. If you're in doubt then just use article.
If you don't have any posts you can use none. In this case we're choosing article they
might start blogging, I don't know just keep article.
And then you can choose a blog
posts or is it actual news. News is only for news websites of course. And we have schema
type for pages. In our case our pages should have none because they're not articles. Projects, we
also don't have them so choose none. Then we press save and continue. Welcome to your Rank Math SEO
dashboard. On the modules dashboard over here you can actually enable and disable certain modules. If
you press on one of these settings of the modules over there, we go to settings page, but we'll be
walking through this step by step so we're not going to do this right now. Go to your dashboard
and the first thing we want to do is actually scroll down, and enable image SEO.
Enable this, very
important. We're going to set this up later on. Alright now we're actually going to configure all
the settings of all the modules and of Rank Math. On the left side you have Dashboard and you have
Analytics over there. If you click on analytics. On this dashboard you will see your overall
optimization of the site and analytics over here, your SEO performance over there, the keyword
positions over here and when you click on open report you will go to these steps over here. The Site
Analytics is actually saying that we have zero pages and posts with a good SEO score. We have nine
with fair, one with poor and 111 that is not filled in a focus keyword.
Hang on, we'll be doing that
later on. When you go to SEO performance over here you will see how your website is performing on
the SEO metrics in Google Analytics. As people will visit your website these metrics will be filled in.
If you go to keywords over here, you can see your top position of keywords. Really great. You go to
Rank Tracker. This only works if you have the pro version of Rank Math SEO. When do I advise you to
buy this? Well if you are in a very competitive market and if you really want to have a top three
position in Google, this could be really useful if you're trying to rank on a lot of keywords.
But
for the average use,r you don't actually need this. Then go to Index Status. If you upgrade to Rank
Math Pro you can actually see if your pages are indexed in Google. But there's another way to see
this without Rank Math SEO, just straight in your Google Search Console. If you have no idea how that
works, no problem. Just follow this tutorial and I'll show you step by step how the Google search
Console works, and what you can actually do with it. For now we go to the left side and we go to
settings over here. We will walk through all these settings one by one, so no worrys, I got you covered.
Let's first start with links. The first thing we can do is to skip the category base. If you're
using categories for posts you will see on your website: yourwebsite.com/category/ and then the
category. I really advise you to enable this one. So that it becomes yourwebsite.com/your-category/. Way
more cleaner way more better for search engines. So let's scroll down a little bit.
Redirect
attachments, keep this o. If you have orphan attachments with no real post or page
it will be sent back to the home website. Keep this this way, make sure this is not enabled.
Now if you're pointing to external images – I don't know why you would have this – but then you could
add a no follow link so the Google bot will not follow your link to the other website. If you're
using a lot of external images you should turn this on. Most website however never do this, so
don't turn this on. And we've already turned this on, so this is great. Press save changes.
Then we go to the breadcrumbs over here. So if I want to have my breadcrumbs on my
website you could code it in like this, or just use a shortcode over here.
You can also use
of course the Gutenberg block, but in my case I'm using Divi, so let me show you how this works, real
quick. We have this beautiful page with a lot of pictures and descriptions. Now I want to have over
here I want to have breadcrumbs. Really easy. We're just gonna create a new row over there. Just
simple like this. We're going to insert a text module and then I'm going to switch to the text
editor and I'm gonna paste in this shortcode of Rank Math. And don't forget to change the link color
go to Design, Text, Links and we're going to make this our Global deep purple color over here. Which
is really nice. Save. I'm going to save this page. And now when I exit my visual Builder you will see
that we have this beautiful breadcrumb over here. Of course we need to style this a bit more, but
what the functionality is, now you can also go to the street of all the apartments.
Then we are here
at the parent page. And you can go back to this one. And then we are here again. And then I can also go
to the the parent page of the parent page, of this page. Now you can choose your separator character
if you want this one, a pipe or a dot or something else completely like you want. Like this.
You can do anything you want. Let's keep it on the arrows. Here you can choose if you want to have a
homepage link, and the label 'Home' or 'Start' or whatever you want over here. This is the link for
your home page and you can add a prefix. Let me show you how this works, the prefix will be added
in over here right there.
If you have archives you will see "Archives for" in your breadcrumb pages. You
can change this to anything you want. Also with the search results format, "You have searched
for" this is only the breadcrumbs. Change this to whatever you want. A 404 label. Here you can choose
to hide the post title. so when I hide it you only see the upper line things. This can be useful if
you have really long titles like this website has. It will show all the ancestors below it. On most
websites we disable this. And the taxonomy name is great just keep it hidden. Press save changes. And
then we go to images over there. You should really add missing alt attributes. Why? Because it's really
important for Google to see what this image is all about.
Of course with the AI they know what the
image is about, but you need to add the attributes also for people with reading disabilities. How
should it work? If you have changed your file names the correct way – I'll show you in a minute
how to optimize them – then it could use the file name as a alt attribute. And in a minute we'll be
changing all titles from our images. Or you could add a title attributes I would say don't do it,
because when you hover your mouse over the image it will show the title attributes on most themes.
But I never use it on websites, and I rank pretty good in Google.
If you're in doubt about it just
keep it off, if you actually want to learn more about it, just Google it and look it up. Press save
changes. Then we go to the webmaster tools over there. Here you can add your Google search console
verification. As I've said before I don't rely on plugins to do this for me, I just add them in
inside of my theme which I think is the best way, or use Google analytics to verify your website.
Let's go to the robots.txt. In here you could change the robots.txt if it's not already there. If
it is, it is not writable. What you can do is delete it from your website and then you can add it over
here. In my case we already created this and this works really great. So we're not gonna change this.
If you don't know how to delete your robots.txt file, and you're not sure if it's already being
configured correctly, then follow this tutorial and I will show you exactly how to do it with FTP.
It's
completely free, and I'll show you how to set it up from all kinds of different hosting companies. Then
we go to 'Others' on the left side. Headless CMS, well most websites don't use this. Show SEO scores to
visitors… "Show SEO score to visitors" have you ever been to a website where you saw a badge which
says: "This post reaches 9 out of 10 on SEO score" And then we can add content before each post in
our RSS feed.
Most websites don't use this. If you are a News website with a lot of blogs coming
out, you might have another plugin to handle the RSS content. Let's go to blocks over there. If
you're using Gutenberg, use this to change the table of contents title. You can change this to
for example this. However I like to keep it on this. Unordered list, a numbered or a none. You
could change this whatever you like more, but I like the unordered list for our table of contents.
Then you can choose to exclude headings, this is really useful if you're using a lot of headings
that you don't want to show in the table of contents. In our case I want to have all the headings so
we're just not selecting anything. Just press save changes. Then we go to .htaccess.
If you're going
to edit it it can actually break your website so make sure not to change anything inside of your
.htaccess if you don't know what you are doing. Let's go to the 404 monitor. This is a really
powerful feature and you can put it on advanced if you want to see where they are coming from. And
I say that is the whole point of a 404 monitor, so keep this to Advanced. The only downside of this
is that if you have hundreds of 404 errors, it might increase quickly. If this is a new website
you could easily keep this on advanced if you have a lot of 404 errors, just keep this first
on simple, fix the most 404 errors, and then go back and put it on advanced.
Then you can set
the log limit, let's keep it 100, it's okay. And here you can exclude some paths from your 404
monitor. There might be cases where you want to exclude paths from 404 monitoring. And parameters
should be ignored for the most websites. But if you're a developer you should definitely turn
this off. Then we go to redirections over here. Again, such a very nice module and it makes the
use of other plugins – I usually use – unnecessary. So Rank Math thank you very much. If you want to debug
redirections you can enable this one and then you will see errors instead of being redirected.
but only for administrator. Useful if you're running like an affiliate website or something.
Most websites don't need this however. Then we have some fallback behavior. If nothing similar is
found then it will go to the default 404 page, or maybe you want them to redirect to the home page,
or a custom redirection. If you do this however people don't actually know what's going on. They
click a link they go to your home page and they don't know…
"Why am I here? Did I click the wrong
link?". They will search for the page they went from or press the back button and try again. If you
show them the 404 then they will see "Oh there's something wrong with this page". Most cases just
keep it on 301 you're fine. And then we have the auto post redirect, which is a really powerful
feature. If you enable this one: if you change the slug or of a post or page within WordPress
it will automatically create a redirect in Rank Math.
That is really powerful. If you have
changed your post you get a message from Rank Math that it has been saved as a redirection. You can
always go back to 'Redirection' and change it from there. Then we go to Analytics over here. When its
green, everything's working the way it should, so really great. If you don't anonymize IP address
you can do this in Google Analytics by yourself, you don't need Rank Math to do this. If you don't do
this, like this setting, you actually should ask for cookie placements according to the European law.
Then we have the analytics database, so you can see it in your dashboard. 90 days really great. You
can delete it manually or update it manually. Great. You can actually see how much size it will take on
your website. The front-end stats bar is actually when you edit Pages or posts. Now this is what they mean
with the front-end stats. Either these things the content AI score, SEO score, and search impressions.
and of course your upsell to the pro version. But you can also just press on this button and then
it's been folded up and then it's over here.
So you can always click on it if you want to do it. Really
useful. Just turn it on or off whatever you want. Now here we're talking about email reports. If you
want to receive periodic SEO performance reports for your website, it's very nice to have this one, to
receive one every 30 days. How does it look? Well a little bit like this, but in our case right now we
don't have actual statistics, because we're just installing a Rank Math. Keep this on, because
it's really fun to see.
Press save changes. Alright then we go to content AI over there. Now this is
really important to configure. Your default country should be the country of your target audience. In
our case we have a English website for people all around the world who can rent apartments in the
Netherlands. So I should keep this on worldwide. However, if we are talking about a website in the
Netherlands itself for example, we should scroll down and pick down the Netherlands. So we have
other content AI suggestions and keywords and links to include any meta. And here you can select
the post type where you want to have sophisticated AI suggestions. In your posts, pages or projects. Just
keep them on they're great. Press save changes. All right well done, we have walked through all the
settings. Then we go over here to titles and metas. In this tutorial we will be walking through
all these settings on the left side, so don't worry, it might look overwhelming, but I got you
covered. This one says to the Google Robots – who are indexing your website – they will see to Index
this site.
That means show the pages in the search engines. Or to 'no index' them. If you put everything
on 'no index' your entire website will not be visible in the search engines. So keep this on
index. No follow, no image, index, no archive, no snippet. You see the keyword here "no"?
That is not useful to turn this on in the global meta. You could use this on
individual pages or posts, but not on the global meta. Just keep it on index. Advanced robots meta are all
good, just keep them in there.
No index we already set that up. And then we have a separator character in your
title. Before we go on let me explain you a little bit how this works. Well this is the title then we
have a separator over there, and then we have the site title, there it is. So the title is always the
one of the posts, and of course the meta description below that. So now we have the title for posts or
pages, and then we have the separator, and then the website title. Great, just keep it on this one. Let's
scroll down. Here we can capitalize all titles. Then it automatically capitalize the first character of each
word. Maybe you want this, so just enable this if you want it.
Then we have the opengraph thumbnail,
really great. Twitter card type, really great, just keep this one, and press 'Save changes'. Then we go
to Local SEO over there. Of course it's very important to claim your business if you have a
local business on Google, if you have not already done so, you should do this at Google My Business.
If you don't know how that works, drop it in the comments, then I will make a tutorial especial about
this one. This is all very good, but now we can also add a email address. Search engines display your
email address. There should be something like info@ or reply@ or backoffice@ or… I don't
know what you're using for your website. Then you can fill in your address over there, if you do have
however a local business that you want to people can actually visit and find you, then fill in out
all these things your addresses in your postal code that would be great. Here you can change the
address format over there, and just change it to the way in your country it works.
Then you have the
business type, your opening hours in 24 hours or 12 hours like this. And here you can see it set your
opening hours for your business. I'm not working on sunday so I'm gonna remove this, and just change
it to whatever you want. If you want people to call you add them in over there customer, you can
choose all these things, really useful for Google. And you can add more numbers if you want. If you're
not using any numbers just press remove and keep this empty. What on earth should you fill in the
price range? Well it's a relative system. So if you fill in one dollar sign, it is very inexpensive. If you
fill in two dollar signs, it's moderate. If you're filing three dollar signs, it's expensive. If you
fill in four dollar signs, it's very expensive. And if you feel it like this: five dollar signs. Then
you're talking about a very exclusive expensive things. In this case I'm going with three dollar
signs, because they have cheaper apartments and more expensive ones, just whatever suits you.
Then
we have the about page. Click on it and type in the name of your about page. I really think you
should have one, no matter what your business is. Then you have a contact page. I'm definitely sure
you should also have this one. Click on it and add it in. Do you have the Google Maps API Keys? Already
filled in, great keep it like this.
And you can add your Geo Coordinates of your business. Press save
changes. And don't forget you can also use this shortcode to display the contact information
in a nicely formatted way for Google. Yes. Let's go to social meta over here. Here you can add your
Facebook page URL, your authorship admin app secret username for Twitter, and additional profiles,
if you have them. My client does not have any social media so we're gonna keep this completely
empty. Let's go to the home page. We can change the setting of the home page in our home page
itself. We'll be doing this in a minute. Then we go to post formats over there. This is kind of a
template for how your post SEO information should be built up. For example the archive titles should
be like this. The term, and then they have a word called 'Archives' then you have the page separator
and the site name. In our case this workes great for archives. Just keep it this way, but you can
also remove the archives word or do whatever you want it.
More info like this, or I don't know, or
details for example, could be like this, whatever you want. Then you have the archive descriptions.
Now standard are the archive pages are on no index. So they won't appear in search engines. This is
a good thing, because most archive pages are not intended to rank in Google because you want the
pages or posts to individually show up, or to have other pages you've created. Really great keep
this on just press save changes. Alright then we go to authors, over here. If you don't have a
lot of authors on your website, you're the only one and you're not even blogging or creating
posts, then you should really disable them, like this. To avoid duplicate content no index author
archives. If you keep them enabled. Let's go to the next one misc pages over here. And then we
have the date archive pages. Again, if you create a lot of blog posts then this could be useful,
if you're not doing it at all just disable them. By default these are also no index, they are
not for the search engines, they are only for your visitors.
In this case I'm going to disable them,
the date archives. Then you have your 404 title. Page not found and then your separator and then your
site name. You can change this to whatever you want. Its not that important.
The search result title you can keep it like this, or you can change it like… It's important to
prevent search result pages from getting indexed really important, keep this enabled.
You should keep this disabled, and also this one disabled, no index password protected pages. If you
have content behind a paywall, this is actually very useful to let it be indexed by Google so
people cannot actually read this completely, but when they click on it, they see the paywall
"if you want this content buy a subscription." So keep this disabled. Press save changes. And then
we go to post types over there. Over here we can change the template for our posts. Remember you can
change every post or page individually when editing them, we'll be doing that later on. But this is a
template that's been used standard for all your posts. In this case the title is 'the title' maybe a
page separator, and a site name.
Just keep it like this this is great. All this is actually pretty
good, so we can just keep them on this way. Just click on save changes, and then we go over to
pages over there. Which is actually exactly the same as posts, so you can just scroll down change
anything you want, if it's all good just go to the attachments. Attachment – we have redirected them so
this is great, keep them on this. Projects – we don't have projects on this website, but it's exactly the
same as posts and pages. Then we go to categories over there on the left side, and the categories
is again the same as post, pages, attachments and projects and tags. Something you might want to
change is for example the archives word. It is in every title and you might not want to have this
shown up in the search engines. So remember if you see this word coming back in the Search Engine
Result Page, this is the place to change it.
All is good, let's go to tags over there. Exactly the
same as before, if you want to change it go ahead, if not keep it. Project categories the same, project
tags, the same. And then we go to the last one. Below this one you can see everything generated by your
theme. In my case I have type. I actually don't know exactly why this has been generated from
Divi, maybe it's just on this website, I don't know exactly, I'm just gonna change nothing about it
and just keep it this way. Alright then the next stop is the sitemap settings over here. Before we start
changing this, you need to know what is a sitemap? If you click on this link – open a new tab – you can
actually see your sitemap. This is the sitemap. In this sitemap we have a page sitemap, and it's been
less modified on this date. If you click on this one, you will see a list of all your pages with
how many images are in them, and when it has been last modified.
This is very useful information for
the search engines. And that's exactly what this is, it is meant for the search engines so they can
actually crawl your sitemap and see when it has been changed, how many images are there, and they
can just visit your page according to this list. So this is very important. These settings are all
good except the include featured image. I would suggest you keep this on which is also recommended
by Rank Math. Press save changes. And then we go to the HTML sitemap over there.
You can display it in
a shortcode somewhere on your website. Personally I have never used an HTML sitemap on my website, but
you can just keep it enabled and if you want to show it somewhere on your website, you can use this.
Then we go to pages, they are included. Attachments are all being redirected to the posts or pages
that they're from, so this is all good.
Projects, I don't have them, so that we're gonna exclude them
all. Your pages, attachments, projects, taxonomies, I don't have categories on this website because
I don't have blogs, so I'm gonna exclude it. If you do have them, keep them enabled. Tags don't
use it, if you do, enable it. Again and the same and the same. Press save changes, and then we go on
the left side to instant indexing. So the instant indexing works with the 'Index now protocol'. So
you can send out the URL to this protocol and different search engines knowing "Hey this is
been updated so we can efficiently crawl your website".
Now you can submit it manually so you
can enter in your url over here and press submit. Most of the time, this is not necessary. If you go
to settings you will see that all pages and posts will be automatically submit to the 'Index now
protocol' API. This is great, just keep it on this one. If you don't have posts, disabled it. Rank Math
has generated your own 'Index Now API key' and this is on your website only, so this is great, just
keep it like this. The key is over there, so this all works great.
If you click on history, you will
see what has been sent out, well I have changed something in this website, remember? When I added
the breadcrumbs. Then we get a response 200, it has been sent out to the 'Index now protocol', and it
has been received that it's okay. You don't need to change anything over here, it all works excellent.
Then over here let's go to the 404 monitor. In here we can see all the 404s generated by our website.
In the 404 monitor again you can see all the 404 hits. Most of the time it's just junk, like this when bots
are trying to sniff around to see if you were vulnerable for some malicious attacks, no problem
over here. Now you can see that I have generated a 404 because I have entered this into my browser.
It will be sent out here so this is really great I didn't have a referrer, because I just put it in there.
But most interesting is if you have a normal page over here, and you have a referrer, then we go on the
left side we go to redirections.
In the redirections we can create redirections! Just click on add new.
And here you can go from: for example URL/old And I want this – I will ignore my case so
if it's uppercase or lowercase and I want them to go to /new-URL/ like this. This is
actually oh, just press add redirection. And now it has been added to your redirection.
So if I now go to /old-url/old I will be redirected to alphabetapartments.com/new-url.
It's that simple.
And you can of course click on it, you can deactivate it, and you can activate
it but you can also trash it, or press on view and then you can see if it works. Really simple,
really easy. Sometimes you need this, most of the times you don't. Now redirections are very useful
if you have changed your url. You're changing your title of your post or your page, and it already has
been indexed by Google. In this way you will never lose traffic. And then we go to the SEO Analyzer
over here. Really great. If we press on start SEO Analyzer, it will analyze our entire website to
see where we can improve and where we need to do some more. This is more a kind of a technical test
to see if your website scores good technically. If you scroll down you can see automatic updates are
not enabled on your site, their hosted with me so that's perfectly in order, and it will be updated
regularly.
And if we scroll down we can see there are the most common keywords, very interesting
what does Rank Math sees where your website is all about, and also what does Google see what your
website is all about. We have descriptions and it works on the home page, we have headings all works,
alt attributes, all these things are great. But we have 84 pages with no focus keyword set. That's
not very good. Then we have a mobile snapshot which is not good. I mean this title has to be a
little bit smaller, so I'm gonna change this later on.
Then we have all the canonical tags no index
all these things are actually really great. Minify CSS, now speed is very important for your SEO. But
if you want to see how I optimize this website subscribe to my channel, because in the near future
I will release a video how to speed up Divi and this particular website. So performance we can just
skip this, because we need to do this. Security, well Rank Math is a SEO plugin, and they're not as good
in security like 'a visible plugin' it's not that big of a problem. Your theme is not visible… everyone
can see that I'm using Divi when you look at the source code. So I would ignore all this. And just
use a real plugin to do your security. And then we also have the competitor analyzer if you have
Rank Math Pro, you can run this on your competitors. But if you just look at your competitors closely you
can also see all these things without the analyzer. And then the last option 'Status and tools' here we
can see a rollback.
When rank map goes rogue you can also roll back to the previous version. I've
never had to use this, so it's actually really great. If you want to have a better opt-in you
can do this over here. Don't do this if you're on a live website and you're not a developer, it's
not useful for you. And of course we can use auto updates. If you don't update your website regularly
I really recommend you to update it automatically. Then we go over here to the database tools. In the
database tools you can clear and delete and remove all kind of different things. On most website this
is completely not necessary, only if you bump into problems. But the help desk of Rank Math will tell
you to do so. On the system status tab you can see how your website is actually performing. And here
you can see error logs if there are errors, there are saved over here. Great. And with the Import and
Export you can import settings from other websites or other plugins over here. In my case I don't
want to use Yoast anymore, so I'm going to clean it.
And press clean here you go, everything of Yoast
will be removed out of my database. All done, really good. And when I have refreshed this page, you can
see that no plugins are detected with data, because we've all deleted it. Alright you can also create
a backup if you're… I don't know why… but you can do it. And then the last one this one is just a
link to RankMath.com where you can ask for help. Alright well done we have talked about all these
settings, now let's optimize a actual page to see how Rank Math works practically.
We're actually
going to create a SEO Landing space specifically for some keywords to be found. Let me walk you
through it step by step, so you know how to create a awesome web page, that ranks in Google. Let's add
a new page to our website. Before we do anything we go to Rank Math over here, and we're gonna
put in our focus keyword. Determine for yourself on what keywords this page should be found in
Google. In this case I want it to be "Serviced Apartments" but also the keywords "Utrecht" and
"Rotterdam" which is very important because there are where the serviced apartments are. Now I can
make a sentence of it, like "Service apartments in Utrecht and Rotterdam". But that will not work.
So make sure your focus keywords should be three words maximum, and put them in over there.
Serviced
apartments in Utrecht, Rotterdam, that will be great. Then we're gonna change the title. Add in
the title. As we now know our subject, let's write a title. The title should be your focus keywords
on the front. Service appartments in Utrecht and Rotterdam should be the title of our page. Right,
then we click on edit snippet over there. As you can see now that the title is actually just a
little bit too long. Now we can change that of course so, let's change… we can use remove this
one. And the title we can remove this also and type it in ourselves.
But now it is still too long. So
Serviced Apartments Rotterdam and Utrecht. Oh it's just a little bit too long. So in
this case we're gonna remove the site name and we're gonna type it in our self. Alphabet
Apartment like this. Now it is green. Make sure your title is not too long! This is very important
or else it will be cut off in the search engines and it will not look nice and appealing to click
on it.
Then we have the title, Serviced appertments Rotterdam and Utrecht. Then the permalink. Very important!
this permalink should be your keyword: "Serviced apartment" in here, "Rotterdam" "Utercht". As it is green
with it's not too long it is great so keep it in the green. And then we have the description. The
description is actually very important, because you want to need to click on it. Make sure your focus
keywords are in the beginning of the description. But we're also gonna add a little activation words
within the description. Like this: "Beautiful serviced apartments in Rotterdam and Utrecht with
hotel-like services and home like atmosphere. You don't want to leave our apartment." So the
description should be something like this.
You're the only one that can create this, so think about
it, put your keywords in there, and when you're finished and it's all green – not too big – this is
very important pixels, because Google search engine doesn't look at the characters, it looks at the
pixels, at the width. And when you're all done you can go here over social, and you can actually add
another title in this, or another image if you want so. And when you're done you just click on the
cross over there. Press on publish over here. And now we're going to optimize this page. As I already
have a little bit of content – well it's not very much, it's just this. As you know an SEO landing
page should be really great at text and images. And also well titles of course. Rank Math is very
well integrated with Divi, so we can just click over here on Rank Math, and here we are.
This is the
title, everything we've already added really great. But if we now scroll down you can see over here
a checklist. We have different kind of checklist. This is the basic SEO, additional, title readability
and content readability. The first thing is you're using the focus keyword in the SEO title.
That is over here, we've already done that. Inside the SEO meta description – that is this one, so
we already covered that really great. In the URL also, really great. Then our focus keyword appears
in the first 10% of the content. What do they mean? Well actually this. This is your 10%. Apartments
Rotterdam and the Bild or Utrecht. Always keep in mind that the landings page is not only
for search engines, but also for visitors. Because they can click on your well-optimized SEO page, but
they need to see something that's really enjoying them. When they gonna come on the page they
see quality apartments with hotel-service and Rotterdam and the Bild. Let's change that.
Now we have this, which is actually exactly what I wanted to rank on. But if we go to Rank Math over
here, what do you see at the basis SEO, this should all be green, very important for your SEO.
And the
last one – content is 129 words long – consider using at least 600 words. Well I say we double the words
and we enter them in right here. Because when you scroll down and we go to additional… then we have
more about the text. So we're gonna create more than 1200 words of text. How we gonna create
it? Well let's just say I'm a bit lazy. On our SEO landing page images are very important.
But images also carry a lot of SEO weight. How do we do that? So I want this image to appear on
the landing page.
So we're going to upload a new image specially created for this page. The image
I'm uploading the name of the file is already "Serviced Apartments in Utrecht and Rotterdam" and
this is the Schiedamse Singel 177. All right now the first thing we need to do is: we go to title,
we're going to copy it and paste it into the alt text, over there. And press upload image.
Right there.
All right beautiful. Then we go to design, we're going to make it a little bit rounded corners, just
for this landing page really beautiful. And also a small box shadow, why not just like this. Beautiful.
Again we're gonna use another picture over here because we really want to have people enjoy our
serviced apartments. So this one is going away. And this time I'm gonna add in just a different
title "Quality Service Apartments Lombardhof in Rotterdam" again, and this is the name. So the title.
I'm gonna copy it, paste it also in the alt text over there. Upload image. Now we got it over there.
Really great. Because I'm talking about quality over there, and it's also in the image.
Great. This
is really starting to look at a real great landing page. However we need more call to actions. We
need to add in a button over there like this. With also click here. So now we have a beautiful
button which says "Check availability and pricing" which is of course really nice to have if you
have a SEO landing page.
Now we're talking about cost savings. Cost savings of our Apartments. With
our Apartments of course. Again another picture. In this case we're going to use "Amazing serviced
apartments in Utrecht". Why not. What's always really important is to add in beautiful
reviews over there. Alright, so I think this is a really neat page. Let's see what our Rank Math is
talking about all this content, images and stuff. So let's go to Rank Math again.
What we see now is: the
content is 1323 words long. Good job! Right well done. Then we go to additional, we have still two errors.
Let's see what it is. The focus keyword is found in subheadings really great, also in the image alt BUT, the
keyword density is 2.95 which is high. The focus keyword in combination appears 39 times. What
you can do to see what keyword is ranking too high, is actually to remove these two, and let's see
what this one does to our list. Then it is okay. So they say that the word maybe Utrecht? It's still
okay though that well that really cranks it up. And if I also add in Rotterdam, then it would be too
much, because total it appears 39 times. But apart from each other, they're all good. So keep that in
mind when optimizing the page. Then we go to title readability. What we can see is the focus keyword
is used at the beginning of the SEO title. And the title we are talking about this thing, over here.
Your title doesn't contain a positive or negative sentiment word.
Well you can change that by going
into your title, and change it to for example "Amazing serviced apartments". However you'll
notice that we're completely in red so it's doesn't really good. But if you close it and when
you scroll down you can now see that it has a positive negative sentiment, it contains a power
word, but it doesn't contain any numbers. So what did they actually want? "Amazing" and then it should
be like "58 amazing serviced apartments in Rotterdam and Utrecht".
Then we are all green. However that's a
great title, because they actually have 58 amazing service apartments in Rotterdam and Utrecht,
however to actually work that into this page I'm not really sure. Because I want this page
to rank on serviced apartments. So we're gonna remove this one and we're just gonna keep it this
way, but now you know how you can get all green in this one. If you're blogging about a specific
subject this is really useful. Use a positive or negative word, use numbers in it, works great
to get people click on it. But for this page I'm not sure. We go up and then we go to content
readability. 'You don't seem to be using a table of contents plugin' 'you're using short paragraphs' yes
we are. And your content contains images or videos. Excellent. Make sure that those are in it. A table
of contents what is this? Rank Math says: "If you're writing a long post it's essential to make the
navigation of the post easier". For example using Divi you could use this one. You're just creating
in blocks you can use just Rank Math Pro, or you can use the Elementor Pro, it's all inside of those
things.
If you have a really long blog post, this is very useful. If you're actually covering a
certain topic. In our case, we're just talking about serviced apartments in Utrecht and Rotterdam.
Let's check out the content AI over there, click on it. And you have five credits so when you're all
done, press research. What it does now, it will fetch the search result in Google, and then it
will analyze our competitors on the same keywords. Serviced Apartments. And you can see your score. Well
our score is 29 out of 100. Because I think it's a little bit too big. So Service Apartments, let's
try Service apartments Utrecht. Let's go with this one. So these things are really useful if you
actually want to optimize your page even further. However in our case, what the media account is
all about is those images over there, and also in those images all count as images, and then we
also have the reviews over there which also count as different images.
So yes this is really
interesting, but don't get too hard on yourself to get this really up in the green zone. If you want
you can try to optimize this all together in a green zone, and see how it works. A couple of things
we can easily change on this website is to make more links go to this page. So your internal Link
count is very important. If you really want to push this page up in the search engines, make sure
to link to this page with the right text, with the right content, and the rest anchor keywords, to link
out to this text. One of the easiest way to still do this is just go into your text – somewhere here –
and when you have in your text you have something about Serviced Apartments, just make it a link to
the other page.
If you have any questions or you just want to say "Thank you Matt!", drop it down in
the comments, I'll always reply. Hit that like button if I helped you out, and subscribe
if you want to see more WordPress related videos. And also check this video, its completely
over optimized. It's REALLY over optimized.
