If you are looking to building a functional, SEO-friendly website, WordPress is without a doubt one of the best available platforms. One of the reasons it’s such a popular choice is due to the variety of premium themes available and quality plugins.
Aside from using a number of tools which will help you with your Google ranking, it’s always good to try out an SEO plugin.
Such a plugin which has been rapidly gaining attention in the recent months is Rank Math SEO. It’s still new, but already has over 200 000+ installations.
What is so special about this plugin? It’s the first WordPress plugin with such an impressive list of features that is completely free.
Useful Features
To give you a better understanding of why Rank Math is a great choice, we have compiled a list of some of it’s impressive features bellow:
1. Setup Wizard is extremely easy to follow
A great feature is the simple setup process which takes very little time, due to its step-by-step guide. Not only can you import settings from other plugins, but you can import previously backed up settings as well.
2. Integration of Rich Snippets
After installing Rank Math, you will get a full Google Schema Markup support – you receive it for 14 different types of snippets, allowing to optimize your posts.
3. System is Module-Based
The plugin comes with useful set of modules which can be enabled or disabled depending on your preferences. This will let you create your own personalized experience. Some of the included modules are 404 monitor, Search Console, Link Counter, Sitemap and much more.
4. Internal Linking Suggestions
Another great feature is the Internal linking suggestions, recommending other posts which you can use to link internally depending on your current post. This will help you rank higher on search engines.
5. Google keyword ranking
Rank Match comes with the ability to track your Google keyword ranking. This will help you keep track of your ranking and notify you if you are doing anything wrong, and what to do to improve.
Settings
Rank Math’ s settings dashboard is divided into a number of tabs which help you customize the plugin.
1. Links Everything related to your URLs and links can be tracked here, for example removing stopwords from permalinks, opening external links in a separate tab, etc.
2. Images From this tab you can enable the Add missing ALT attributes option, adding attributes to all of your images.
3. Breadcrumbs
In this tab you can set up breadcrumbs. When you enable this function, you will see other additional options, like choosing the separator character for the breadcrumbs, giving you the option to display them on the homepage or not.
4. Webmaster Tools
With the Webmaster Tools you can verify the site with other 3rd-party webmaster tools, such as Bing, Google Search Console, Baidu, Yandex, Alexa, Pinterest. This can be done by pasting full HTML tags or ID codes.
5. Edit Robots.txt
With this option you can make edits to the robots.txt file. This helps search engines identify the parts of your website that need crawling and indexing. The option however, will not work if you have a robots.txt file in your site’s root folder.
6. Edit. htaccess
This file is used mainly to control redirections and permalinks. The plugin allows you to make changes from the WP admin panel.
Make sure to be extremely careful when making edits to the file as it’s easy to make a mistake and cause damage to your website. If this happens, you can restore the file by replacing the htaccess file with the plugin’s backup copy using the FTP client.
7. WooCommerce
If you are using WooCommerce to sell your products, then this option is very useful. You can optimize your URLs and products pages.
8. Others
In this option you have various settings included. For instance, you can choose if you want to show the SEO score or not, turn off and on usage tracking, etc.
Content Analysis
In addition to all other useful features, Rank Match wouldn’t be so great if it lacked the means to analyze this content in an easy and efficient way. It can analyze the overall SEO score of pages and posts and gives you suggestions on how to make improvements.
Additional useful options
Titles and Meta
This section includes different SEO options which help you adjust settings for different post types, as well as product categories and tags.
Sitemap Settings
Here you can see the XML sitemaps-related settings. Aside from the general settings, you can configure the sitemap settings for all types of posts and taxonomies.
Role manager
If you have multiple roles on your site, this can be a very handy option. You can control what each user has access to in Rank Math.
SEO Analysis
Similar to Content Analysis, SEO analysis is a tool, which helps you analyze the SEO of your whole website, advises you on possible changes and gives you useful suggestions.
Import and Export
This option gives you the chance to export all plugin meta data and settings and reuse them for a different website.
Conclusion
Rank Math SEO threatens to become a very serious competitor to other SEP plugins out there. It will take some time, however, until it becomes the next big plugin. In the meantime, if you are looking to improve your site’s SEO and have not decided on a plugin, why not try Rank Math?
