Rank Math is a powerful SEO plugin for WordPress that offers a wide range of features to help optimize your website’s visibility on search engines. To harness its full potential, it’s essential to configure the plugin correctly. In this comprehensive guide, we will delve into the best Rank Math settings for websites and e-shops, ensuring that your SEO efforts yield maximum results.
The Importance of Tailoring Rank Math Settings
Before we dive into specific settings, it’s crucial to understand that each website is unique. Your site’s content, structure, and goals may differ significantly from another website, which is why customization is key. While we will provide recommendations, it’s essential to adapt Rank Math to your specific needs and objectives.
General Settings
Dashboard
The Rank Math dashboard provides an overview of the plugin features. You have the ability to enable or disable features just by clicking a checkbox. As suggested in many articles in this blog, we prefer to keep everything lightweight. Our suggestion is to disable all features except Sitemap, Schema Markup, Local SEO and Instant Indexing (and Woocommerce if you manage an e-shop of course).
Second part of the dashboard (it’s long):
Third part of the dashboard (it’s longer than you expected):
In General Settings:
Links tab
Optimize links by enabling “Nofollow External Links” and “Open External Links in New Tab/Window” if they align with your linking strategy. It’s best if you let external links open in new tab/window.
Breadcrumbs tab
Customize breadcrumbs to enhance user navigation and site structure. Ensure that the breadcrumb format and hierarchy reflect your website’s content organization. If you use a theme that handles breadcrumb, or you prefer to customize them on your own (as we suggest), leave this feature disabled.
Webmasters Tools
For Webmaster Tools it’s best if you configure all these settings outside of Rank math’s scope. After all, if you prefer to use Yoast SEO in the future, you don’t want your verifications to break, right? The same exact thing we suggested in the Yoast SEO settings article.
Other tabs
You can leave Others tab untouched, as the default settings here are best to be left as they are if you don’t have any specific requirements.
Configuring robots.txt and .htaccess
Configure other essential options like “Edit robots.txt” and “.htaccess” files only if you have advanced knowledge of these files. Make changes cautiously to avoid unintended consequences. Again, it’s best if you edit those files outside of the plugin in order for you to maintain best management of those files.
Blocks tab
You can leave “Blocks” data section untouched if you don’t have any specific needs:
WooCommerce Tab:
For Woocommerce settings, we prefer the below settings for our e-shops. Make sure you keep “Remove Generator Tag” enabled and choose the Brand taxonomy you are using (if any). URL structuring is per your liking, so we won’t comment on that.
Titles & Meta
Global Meta
Customize global meta tags, including the title and description format, robots meta tag and open graph data. Ensure that these settings align with your brand’s messaging and SEO strategy. Default settings are fine. Make sure you pay attention to the suggested image dimensions for best seo scores (plugin will accept lower but Google will not like it). Also, we know you are interested into using a different separator than everyone else does, but stick to the basics. Visitors prefer what they have used to.
Local SEO
If your website targets a local audience or has physical locations, optimize your local SEO settings by providing accurate business information. Include your business name, address, phone number, and business hours. Utilize structured data markup to enhance local search visibility.
Social Meta
Enhance your SEO profile by configuring social media-specific meta tags for various platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. This is different than the verification we avoided before. The URLs provided below, will be added in the meta tag json file that is included in every page, informing the search engines that we relate with those Social Media profiles. And Search Engines love websites that are related to Social Media profiles (specially those with high engagement)!
Homepage
Tailor the title and meta description for your website’s homepage to make it more appealing and informative to search engine users. The data added below will most probably be overridden by the specific page data in the page settings, but let’s make sure you have filled those up in case it can be proven helpful.
Authors
Customize the author’s archive page settings and optimize the author’s profile. Include relevant information about each author, such as a brief bio and links to their social media profiles. For websites that the editorial staff writes all the articles under one single author, our suggestion is to disable author archives. That is because the author archive is an exact duplicate of all posts page (main Blog page), since the author is always the same. That may result to a lot of issues and confusion for your visitors, while Google will not like it either.
Misc Pages
Fine-tune meta tags for miscellaneous pages like 404 error pages, search pages, and pagination pages. Make these pages user-friendly and informative to improve the overall user experience. Our main suggestions here is to leave the Date Archives deleted, as well as enabling no-index tag for Password Protected pages to make sure they are not available in Google Results. The website search results should be indexed per your preference, you have enabled it in our example, but if a proper page structure is available or the search results are not optimal, maybe it’s better to disable that.
Post Types
Set specific meta tag settings for different post types, including posts, pages, attachments, and products (if you have a WooCommerce store). Tailor your meta tags to suit the content and purpose of each post type. Make sure you select Blog Post for the Article Type and Article for Schema Type.
Pages should retain the Article Schema Type, but have “Article” in Article Type (as opposed to Blog Posts).
Lastly, if you run an e-commerce store make sure you have selected WooCommerce Product as the Schema Type for your products.
Category and Tags Archives
Customize how category and tag archive pages appear in search engine results by adjusting meta tags and other settings. Ensure that these settings align with your content categorization strategy.
Product Categories and Product Tag Archives
For WooCommerce stores, optimize SEO settings for product category and tag archive pages. Firstly, enable Add SEO Controls so you can edit SEO settings of each category on it’s settings page. Then, disable Slack sharing if you don’t need it. The rest of the options can remain unchanged.
Sitemap Settings
General
Configure general sitemap settings, including links per sitemap, images appearance, exclusion of specific terms or Ping for search engines. We suggest you use the default settings, as well as including any taxonomies that you believe are not worth sharing with Google (remember, if a taxonomy does not have many items, maybe it’s better to hide it until it gets bigger).
HTML Sitemap
Create an HTML sitemap for improved user navigation and better SEO. The structure and content of your HTML sitemap is automatically created by the provided shortcode. You just have to copy it and paste it into a new simple page for it to display an HTML sitemap fo your website.
Add it to a page as presented in the image below:
Post Types
Fine-tune sitemap settings for different post types, such as posts, pages, and products. Ensure that your sitemap accurately includes your site’s content per your preference. Most commonly, posts, pages and products are all included in the sitemap.
Taxonomies like Product Categories and Product Tags
Optimize sitemap settings for taxonomies, including product categories and tags, or brands. Properly structured taxonomies enhance content discoverability for search engines and users alike. Make sure you include them in the Sitemap because for a weird reason by default categories are not included.
Instant Indexing
Rank Math’s instant indexing feature allows Search Engines to discover your new content quickly. While it can be useful, especially for news websites, it’s not always crucial, as Google Search Console and submitting sitemaps remain effective methods for indexing your content. Also, there is a chance that if you use this tool in a bad way, bad results will be produced for your website. So it’s best you “don’t try this at home” and stick with the default settings and actions.
Configure your Rank Math settings!
Configuring Rank Math correctly is a crucial step in improving your website’s SEO performance. By following the best practices outlined in this guide, you can harness the full potential of Rank Math and ensure that your website or e-shop ranks higher in search engine results, ultimately driving more organic traffic and improving your online visibility. Remember that SEO is an ongoing process, so regularly monitoring your website’s performance and adjusting your settings as needed is key to long-term success. Every website is unique, so adapt these recommendations to your specific needs and objectives to achieve the best results.