There are several WordPress SEO plugins available. Most of us are aware of Yoast. The most widely used SEO plugin for WordPress at the moment, it is present on more than 5 million websites. There are, however, less well-known options that perform just as well and include a variety of capabilities to control your page’s SEO.

Rank Math was founded in 2018 and is based in New Delhi, India. In less than two years since its release, Rank Math has experienced an enormous surge in popularity. It doesn’t rank 1st as WordPress’s most popular SEO plugin, however, given its recent surge in popularity, it is unquestionably the second-most successful SEO plugin of 2020.

Why has it achieved such success? Other SEO plugins can’t compare to the remarkable collection of free features offered by Rank Math. Although a Premium edition is offered, many people just require the free version.

How Rank Math Works?

Each page on your website receives a score from the plugin that indicates how effective it is at SEO. You receive pointers and practical guidance for raising that score, which ought to boost your SEO ranks. In all, Rank Math rates your material on more than 100 variables, which is very thorough for a free plugin.

You may use Rank Math’s free version to optimize each page’s content for up to five emphasis keywords. Most other free WordPress SEO tools, in contrast, only allow you to use one keyword per page. Based on those keywords, Rank Math will analyze your content, headings, and post structure, and make recommendations on how to improve your SEO score. You get real-time score changes as you make changes to your post based on those recommendations.

You may also get site-wide optimization tools from Rank Math. If there are any issues, such as missing alt attributes for photos, 404 errors, pages without titles, and more, the plugin can conduct full-site audits for you and notify you of them.

How to Install Rank Math SEO

• Navigate to Plugin > Add New
• Search Rank Math and click on install.
• Click on Activate

How to Set up Rank Math SEO

• The setup procedure is automatically started when you click on Activate. However, you have the choice to stop the setup procedure and make the necessary changes manually or to resume it later.
  If the setup wizard was not used when you initially installed Rank Math, you may navigate to the WordPress Dashboard > Rank Math > Dashboard > Setup Wizard option to rerun it.
• You must create a free account on Rank Math’s site. This step is essential if you want to have access to all of the plugin’s tools. Click on Connect Account and proceed to create a new account. You can now connect your newly created account to your website.
• On the Getting Started tab, select Advanced Mode.
  You can choose from any of the 3 options; Easy, Advanced, and Custom. However, only Rank Math PRO users are presently able to utilize the Custom mode. The Easy and Advanced Modes are similar to one another. There are more stages in the advanced mode with more complex parameters to customize.  This will give you full control over optimizing your website to rank well in search engines. You also get all free features available, which you wouldn’t find in easy mode.
• Fill in the details of your website; the nature of your website (whether it’s a personal blog or business website), and upload your site logo. By selecting the right choice, Rank Math will be able to add the proper information, which will aid Google in determining whether this website represents an individual or a business and enable its usage in Knowledge Graph. You will be able to select your precise company category from our comprehensive range of business kinds if it is not displayed here.
• The Import tab allows you to import your settings from Yoast SEO. It shows all the input data available on your website from other SEO plugins, which you can import to Rank Math.
• Rank Math ensures that you don’t lose anything while migrating to Rank Math by importing the other plugins’ data.
• During the next step, you’ll be able to connect your website with Google Search Console and Google Analytics. If you’re not using both services yet, we recommend setting up accounts since they can provide you with invaluable information.

There are a lot of plugins that you can use to integrate these services with WordPress.

• When you choose Connect Google Services, Rank Math will request your consent to access your account information. To complete this step of the procedure, click Allow.
• Now, we get to the Rank Math XML sitemap. Rank Math will ask you if you want the plugin to generate a sitemap for your website, whether to include images, and what content it should map. According to Google Developers, a sitemap is “a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site and the relationships between them.” With this file, search engines can crawl your website easily, taking note of the important pages.
  You can omit any custom pages and posts from the sitemap of your website if you don’t want to include them.
• Before returning you to the dashboard, Rank Math will walk you through a few last optimizations. The plugin will let you choose whether to apply the “nofollow” attribute to external links and “noindex” categories and tags without any content.

In subsequent articles, we’ll go more into detail about everyday use and how it stacks up against the current number one SEO plugin, Yoast. For now, you should have installed it by now. Explore the settings and tips the plugin provides. While SEO plugins are great at streamlining your content for high ranks in search engines, it is important to adopt certain practices that will ensure you have the maximum chance of improving your position on search engines. We discussed these practices in this article. What do you think of Rank Math? Have you used it before and how was your experience? Let us know in the comments!