Rank Math SEO Plugin Tutorial 2025 | WordPress SEO tutorial For Beginners

Key Takeaways

hello from WP roads my name is Pascal and in this tutorial I'm going to show you a step-by-step guide to configure the free version of frankmat SEO plugin to optimize your WordPress website and start ranking and be found on Google and other search engines of course following this video you're going to learn how to set up all your WordPress website SEO Basics as you will see rankmath makes it very easy for you to fill all the metadata that Google needs to know about your website to start indexing your pages posts and most of all to start showing your content the right way to the right people as always you will find the video timestamps in the description box down below and you can use them to jump quickly and easily to the parts of the video that you're most interested in but if you're starting from scratch I highly recommend you to watch the video from the beginning till the end let's have a look now to the structure of this tutorial 10 steps in the first step we will just check some technical SEO settings we will then set up your free rank matat account in the third step we will install rank matat and launch the setup wizard to set up the basic features of frankmat together in the fourth step we will become familiar with frankmat modules in the fifth part of the tutorial we will then go through all the rank matat general settings then we'll go through all the rank mat titles and meta in the seventh step we will see how rank matat creates automatically for you an XML sitemap and connects it to Google search console and number eight we learn how to monitor all the 404 errors on your website and how to set up custom redirections will then dive deep into the optimization of your website homepage we will finish then this tutorial with the 10th step optimizing a blog post by setting up some Focus keywords and try to rank in the first page of Google search results so if now you're ready to start just grab a cup of coffee of tea or of anything you drink when you work or when you follow tutorials and let's get started before starting there are some technical SEO stuff that you need to check and you need to be sure that you have correctly set up before uh diving deeper into the rank matat configuration the first thing to check is to have an SSL connection so be sure that your website is running on https and that when you are in your browser and you type here into this icon you will see that there is a secure lock connection that says that your connection is secure this is very very important and when you open your link you should see https double uh colum SL slash and so on so the https should be the starting of your url this is very very important if you do not see this and if you for some reason you see connection not secure this is something you want to resolve immediately and I will suggest you to reach out your to your hosting company and ask them to enable your SSL connection so if you want to be sure to have a free SSL when you install WordPress on your hosting I have a full tutorial about hosting a which is personally one of my favorite hosting companies at the moment it is very affordable and it has uh also a premium service which is very very generous and Powerful so if you want to host your website on a good hosting service just go on with hosting gear I'll leave you in the description below my personal fate link and also the link to the tutorial where you can just see how to set up everything with this beautiful hosting service one other very important option to check out is the settings and permalink struer so you go on settings permal links and you have to verify here to select the post name this is very very important because it makes makes your URLs more readable for you for human beings for users for your visitors and most of all also for Google and other search engines of course if you already have an index website and you had another structure let's say this one you should also be very very careful because if you change this and Google has already indexed all your pages you need to set up a very very in-depth redirection setup for all your pages and posts and custom post types and products and all the different stuff that are present into website so be careful here if you have already an index website but if you're just starting out from scratch just use a post name because it's the best one save changes and now the last thing to be careful of is to go on settings reading and be sure that you have unchecked the search engine visibility so sometimes when you are creating your website from scratch you go here and you discourage search engines from indexing your website because you just want to be left alone during the website construction but but when you finish building your website you should go here and uncheck this so make sure that this is unchecked and save changes so I repeat settings reading and you scroll down search engine visibility uncheck this checkbox it should be clear save changes now to make everything work perfectly you need to create a free account on rank matat Pro so you just need to go on the website rankmath tocom or you can support my work by clicking on my aate link before joining the website so in my case wpr roads.com rankmath I thank you in advance if you want to click on this link before proceeding with the account registration so into the my account tab you see here you can click and you can click on register now right here if you already have an account you just need to log in here to be sure that later on you will be connected with the right account on your website so let's click on register now and here I will create my account my name is Pascal voila and here my email will be this one pascal wpr roads.com perfect I select here by continuing you are agree that you will receive emails from us which you can opt out at any time okay and I agree to terms and conditions cookie policy and privacy policy I click on register and I'm creating my free rank mat account perfect thanks for trying out rank mat we have sent your login details to your email address Pascal wpr roads.com let's go and search for them perfect here you see we have some quick links and most of all we have our username and our passwords I can click on login right here and I will be directly logged into my account okay so here we have a dashboard if you have already have a premium version of rank mat you will see it here and you will be able to download it if you want and then you will see the connected website ites as you can see here I do not have any connected websites now let's go into our WordPress dashboard let's go and click on plugins add new plug-in and we simply search for rank matat here okay this is the one if you already have a premium version of rank matat you do not need to install this one but you simply go to your rank matat account you download the premium version and then you go back here and you click on upload plug-in and you upload your premium version if you do not have the premium version you simply search for Rank matat and you install it directly from here let's activate the plugin and the first time that you activate the plugin you might see a screen like this one connect free account in which rank matat asks you to connect your account so if you click on this button right here you will see a screen like this one since we already created a free account on rmti you will see this screen and you will be able to click on okay activate now if you didn't create a free account or if you see that the account in which you are logged in is not the right one you can click on login here and you will be redirected to the login screen where you will be able to log to your correct rank matat account if you have problems connecting your rank matat account you can always go onto your dashboard now we see that there is this rank matat item right here we can go into the dashboard we can click on help and we see that here we can click on this button to connect our account okay in my case this is the right account that I want to connect to to my rank matat installation so I click on okay activate now and now you see account connected perfect if I want to to disconnect the account and connect to another one I just click on disconnect account and when I click on connect now I can simply go and log in here and change the account I will leave this one in my case perfect so when you go back to your account on rank mats you go and click on websites you will see that your website is now connected to your account great once you proceed in connect your free rank matat account you will see a screen like this one which is the setup wizard if you do not see it don't worry because you just need to go into your dashboard click on rank mat dashboard and click on Setup Wizard as you can see it's very easy okay now let's start with the general Setup Wizard so here we have three different uh Solutions we can choose the easy steps the advanced steps or the custom mode but this is available only if you have the pro version so let's see the advanced one it's the best one to start and we can click on start wizard now keep in mind that all the options that you see here in the setup wizard they will be also available in the rank match settings that we will also see in depth in the next steps of the tutorial so don't worry if there are some things here that you can uh do immediately because we will go back on the settings also in the next steps of the video so this is the first part where we can just kind of have a quick quick setup of some important settings but we will also see them later on and of of course you can come back here if you want to rewatch this part of the video if it's necessary for you so here we have the your side settings you can we can click down here we can scroll down here and we can see that we have to choose the type of business here if we have uh if we are setting a setting up rankmath for a personal blog we can simply choose personal blog and it's quite easy if we are are a community a personal portfolio if we have a small business if you have a web shop we just can select here and if you select a Business website normally you'll be asked also to to indicate here the business type for example here my case it's educational organization because I provide tutorials and content about about WordPress in this case but if there are some uh if there are if you cannot find the type of business for your business you can simply leave it on organization this is quite uh quite good like this okay when you scroll down here it's very important to put inside here the website name so the name that people use to search for your website in my case this one is WP roads and here to the website alternate name you should use the same name of your website in this case I use the wp roads this is because um if you put it here into the website name and into the website alternate name you will be sure that Google will be displaying your correct website title even here in the search results Snippets and in my case here it hasn't been updated yet you see here Google is displaying the okay the logo of my website okay but the title of the website is still as the URL you see here and I don't want this to happen because I just want this to appear there as the title of my website and so I will suggest you to use the same title here and here because this can help Google know that you want this kind of title to be displayed in search results and I've also read this tap in the um in the Facebook group of rank mats and there was someone from from the rank mat team suggesting to do so if you want to tell Google to update this kind of title of the website into the search results zipits and by the way this is a a rich snippet that is appearing thanks to rank mat so that's great and I have just um uh configured rank mat a couple of days ago when I was recording this tutorial and you will see how you can just switch from a result like this one when someone types the name of your website you see WP roads this was the result about a couple of days ago and then after installing rank mat and optimizing all the pages you see here I have the beautiful title and excerpt I have also some quick um links to my internal pages and that's great that's a rich snippet and I obtain it just by optimizing and uh uh setting up rankmath on my website this is great so I hope that you two will obtain something like this when you finish this tutorial let's go on and uh down here you have to choose the name of the person organization so you can either put the name of your brand or you can add your personal name depends of the kind of business that you are running in my case I want to show here also my name and together with the name of the brand so Pascal WP roads okay here we have the logo for Google and keep in mind that this is the logo that rank matat will how would you say will communicate to Google when Google will crwl your website to tell Google that that's the logo of your business and Google will choose if uh it wants to eventually use it for the knowledge graph and the knowledge graph is something like this you see here when you type the name of a a business and you type for example about or you want to know more about a business or a city or uh um a country or anything Google generates automatically a Knowledge Graph like the one that you're seeing here on the right side of the page right here and basically it uh it displays some important information about your business and all the information that we are providing right here here they can be used actually in the knowledge graph generated by Google so maybe in uh in one year or in 12 months which is the same by the way or in uh in a couple of months I don't know when I will type in WP roads about I will also have a Knowledge Graph like this one displaying a description of my business and so on I will show you later on during the tutorial also how you can optimize even further all the things that you can do to obtain uh to try to obtain a Knowledge Graph like this but going back to our logo here the logo that we will upload here is just a logo that Google can use if it wants to generate an open graph about our business so you see here PayPal and this is the logo that PayPal has submitted as the open graph logo and basically this is the same that will happen when we will upd upload here our logo so I want this logo to be used as the logo that will represent my business so I will leave it here in this case and then down here we have the default so share image this is very important and this will be a fallback image because it will work as a fallback if a page or a post or a product on your website would not be would not have a featured image so if you are not adding a feature image to any all the pages and all the posts and all the products of your website and you want to be sure that there will be an image appearing when people will share your website on the web you have to set up a default social share image I strongly suggest to do so in my case you see here is a general image that speaks about about my business and so I will be sure that even if I have some pages on my website that have no featured image for example if I go on pages here and I select for example the homepage and I see that that I forgot here to set up a featured image and what happens now if I do not set up a global featured image like this one I will see simply a link without an image which is quite quite not nice when I share it on Facebook or on Twitter or any other any other social media while if I set up a card like this one a social media image like this one you see here I share my homepage and even if I do not have a featured image I see my social media image fallback which is this one which is great because if you do not have an image for every Pages you will be still be able to show a beautiful image about your website and your brand so it's very important to set up this one let's click on Save and continue now and here in the next step you have to connect to your Google services and to your Google account this is a very important step because you can retrieve many data from Google analytics if you already have an account and from Google search console Google search console is in my opinion the most important connection that you have to do in this fa in this phase here of this Setup Wizard because if you connect correctly to Google search consult you will be able to rank matat will be able to submit automatically your website sitap to Google which is a very important step and you do not have to worry about it if you connect with this with the search console in this pH phase and most of all you will be able also to see many data of the of the SEO performance of your website directly into your WordPress dashboard into the rank matat dashboard so this is great and we will also see it later on during the tutorial tutorial and let's click on connect Google services okay let's select the account that we want to associate with rank mat in my case this is the Google account that I will use and here I click on continue here you can choose which kind of misss you want to give to rankmath in order to be able to use all the features that rankmath will provide you in my case here the addit Google analytics management entities of course I want rank matat to do it for me and to connect of course my Google analytics account in this case if I select this rank matat will also be able to create an account for me if I do not have one and to connect it with my rank matat account here I can go on by providing also the permission to see and download my Google analytics data of course I can go on here by selecting also the search console data and here the manage the list of sites and domains I control this is also regarding search console okay so all these permissions that we are given to rankmath will allow rankmath to give us a lot of important data inside our rankmath dashboard and most of all to generate a sitemap and to submit it and verify it to the Google search console which is very very important so this is great if you do not want to use Google analytics of course of course you can uncheck this and rank matat won't access your Google analytics and won't create a Google analytics account and in my case I will just leave it enabl because I want to test it and see how it works and then all this other stuff you need to keep them enabled you click now on continue here okay and now rank matat is connected to Google services this is perfect and here in a few seconds you will see that rankmath will create for you an account and it will connect your website to the Google search console and it will also verify it and later on it will also submit automatically the sitap of your website to Google search console this is great you will also see some important data from Google search console like search Impressions and many other stuff directly into your rank matat uh dashboard you will see down here the same happens for Google analytics you will have a new account created for you if it's not the case you can create one for free on the Google analytics website and once you have create this account for free you will be able to see it right here to select it and to select the property and also to tell rankmath to install the analytics code and to exclude for example logged in users if you have a membership website or if you do not want to track your own visit as an administrator of the website for example if you have the premium version you can also anonymize the IP address which means that you are not Gathering some personal information about your website visitors this is great for gdpr and to be sure to be compliant in places like Europe for example if your traffic comes from there and uh this is uh great if you do not want to use Google analytics of course you you uncheck the boxes in the previous step and you can also decide to not to install the analytics code unless you install it like this or in a different way you won't be able to see the Google analytics data into your rank mat dashboard of course but in my case I want to enable this to just to see how it will work in the in the back end and uh don't worry if you see this SP here red because this is not important once you have saved this step they will become green so don't worry down here you have also the email reports which are just basically email reports about an overview of your website search performance during the month and you will save and continue let's go on perfect now if you go back one step you will see that the dots will become green normally so don't worry and of course keep in mind that also in the next steps of the tutorial I will show you how you can access this settings here and just if you want to change something tweak around stuff you will be able to do it not only here in the setup wizard but also in the rank mass settings later on I will show you how to do so of course if you want to reconnect or disconnect or test your connections you can always choose to use these quick links which are very helpful let's go on now with the next step and here we are to the sit map settings of course here you have just some basic settings and we will see later on during the video the rest of the settings of the sitap which are pretty Advanced but in this case just leave it like this I will suggest you here to enable of course the XML sitap which is generated automatically by rankmath and basically it will tell Google the structor of your whole website including all the posts Pages categories and all the content that Google should know about your website and should index so of course here you can also decide if you want to include images in this sitemap and if you do so basically Google will know which images are associated with your pages posts and C ories and it will eventually show them in search results if they are pertinent to the users searches so in my case images are very important because they are kind of describing and supporting the content of my of my post and my articles and in your case if your website is about something that could benefit about important images that are describing the content of your posts of your products and so on it's best practice to live this enabled if your images will just be images with a Decor decorative functionality so just uh uh random images that you pick up just to support a little bit your content but nothing important you can also disable this but in general it's better to enable this and to include images into our sit map down here we can choose if we want to include in the public post types the posts Pages landing pages resources and based on the kind of custom post Types on or plugins that you have installed or on your on your website you can see here any other kind of um cust simp post types for example you can see products or any other kind of stuff in my case I have landing pages and resources but since these are kind of um content that I will share in a private way or anyway in campaigns and in some kind of stuff that do not need to be indexed I will just need to index my posts and my pages which are just the basic kind of content on my website in my case so here be careful to select just the kind of content that you want Google to know about and to index and down here the same in public taxonomies in my case I just want to index the category Pages which will be the categories of my blog content so for example WordPress tutorials Elemental tutorials and so on so I just want to index my category P pages and I do not want to index all the other kind of categories and taxonomies because they are just internal use taxonomies so I do not need to show them on Google of course here once you have finished you can click on Save and continue and we can go on now by adding some SEO tweaks perfect the first one is no index empty category and tag archives I'll show you what this what this means it's very easy if you go on your blog sometimes you have just created some categories but you're not yet ready to use them or they just need to be there but you're not uh feeling content in that category let me show you here a quick example this is an example of an empty empty category on my on my blog and I do not want this category to be indexed so rank mat as an automatic option here that will place this empty categories with a no index tag which basically it says to Google it says to Google to no index. Pages which is great so leave this enable down here we have two other important options the first one is no follow external links and this is a tricky option I do not suggest you to enable this unless you really really want to obtain this kind of setup because here you're basically telling Google that all the links the external Links of your pages and posts they are no follow links what does it mean it means that you are not passing link juice or link authority to the websites that you are linking to for example if I have an article where I talk about Elementor and I am linking to the element.com website if Google finds that these links are no follow links it basically will receive the information that I do not want to pass credit onto the elemental website in my case while if you disable this each external link that you place into your content will basically tell Google that you are kind of passing some authority to the website that you're linking to so basically you are kind of helping the website to rank better and this is also a double sensor if you if you you can say like this um Synergy because when you link an external website which is a website that has already some Authority like for example element.com in my case also my own blog will receive kind of um a small Authority part to be uh because he is linking the blog my blog is linking to an authoritative website which is element .c so anyway here I suggest you to disable this option and to leave it like this because when you link external links to external resources it's always a good practice of course to pass some link credit because you're also getting some credit back in some ways so this is a qu quite a tricky things to to understand at the beginning but uh just follow me and keep this disabled because it's better and unless you really really want to adopt another strategy and so you enable this down here you have open external links into a new tab this is very important because when people are onto your blog and they going to visit a kind of an external link for example here I have the Elementor Pro link to the Elementor website of course you do not want people to escape your website so they kind of need to open this link into a separate window you see here so your website still stays open in a tab but the other tab opens the new website this is the best practice and so this kind of set up this automatically for you so that you do not have to think about it sometimes this works sometime it doesn't work so uh I just suggest you to leave it enable and then to check each link of your blog post and of your pages when they are external links just check if they really open into a new tab or if you have to just manually set up the that kind of behavior down in the post here for example here to be sure that all the links will open in a new tab I I will also enable this setting right here into Gutenberg in my case but you have the same same setting in DV in Elementor and in many other page Builders of course so basically here are the SEO tweaks we click on Save and continue now and your side is ready of course this is not true because yes we are ready but we are just at the beginning of this tutorial and we have still many steps to do before ranking on Google and before being indexed correctly by Google so now instead of clicking on to return out to dashboard or proceed to the help page we just click on set up Advanced option which is very important so we click here and we can if you want here we can enable the role manager which is just a simple way to enable uh kind of um management of different user roles so if you have some collaborators or teammates that are accessing your website and helping you creating some content like editors authors and so on you can decide which kind of author which kind of role can access the different rank mat options and settings you see here so basically here you can uh you can distribute your um your teammates work by giving them access to different kind of parts of rank mat plug-in here I can disable this because I do not need it right now and I click on Save and continue okay the 404 and the redirection options are very very important so be sure here to enable both of them the 404 monitor basically lets you know when on your website there will be some broken links so some pages that are no more working because you change them for example or because you share them and then you change the url and there are many reasons to receive for four errors and anyway it's a best practice to monitor them and to know what's happening exactly on your website when visitors run into these kind of Errors down here you can also enable redirections this is a setting of frankmat that lets you redirect old broken link pages to new pages that are now working and correctly showing up so this is very important and we will see both of them in depth during the next steps of the video so be sure to enable both of them and now let's click on Save and continue okay here we have this schema Mark app this basically is kind of a code that that rank mat enables for you automatically and that it will apply to your pages posts and custom post types here if you enable the schema type you will see that you can choose the schema type for your posts Pages or products or any other custom post type that you have on your on your website and in my case for my posts since my posts they will all have a video attached to them and they're kind of the video is kind of a central part of my post I will use the video the video schema which will provide me with some important information about the video that I uh uh that I embed on my blog post and if I go then into the rank mat settings I see that under the schema the video will be automatically applied you see here and I can click on the video schema Mark cap and I can insert some important information about my videos here the embed URL the duration of the video and many other information if I'm using rank matat Pro and this basically will tell Google some important info about the content of my blog post in my case so you you can choose between many different kind of different schema markup if you're publishing publishing book reviews or uh uh courses or event or job posting or music reviews or music uh production or products or recipes and so on you can basically choose many kind of different uh schema and in my case I will the video schema type for pages I will suggest you to leave it on article and when when you choose article you have to choose also the article type and if you have a simple blog of course you have to choose article even for your posts of course so where is article here oh article the first one and if you are an organization so your website represents a business you should type into article if your website it's just a personal website and you are writing as a personal author you should choose blog post of course in my case I'm publishing as a business so I will leave it in video here the first one and down here in the pages I will leave them on article if your website publishes news so the you have you are publishing kind of news about topics or about uh news about everyday news you should choose of course the news article in my case I will leave the article also for simple pages and then down here I can choose also the schema markup for any other custom post type that are on my website now these two kind of post types I do not want them to be in my sit map and I do not want them to be indexed so I do not need to have a schema markup let's click now on Save and continue and voila basically we done we did it we just finished the rank mat Setup Wizard okay now that we have finished the rank mat Setup Wizard let's go and explore all the modules that we can enable or disable if we need or not need some features about rank matat so you can go on rackm SEO here you click on dashboard and be careful here to the upper left upper right side of the screen to select the advanc mode of rank mat which is very important otherwise if you select the easy mode you won't see all the modules so let's click on advanc mode and now let's see what all these modules are about the first one is the content AI this is just another rank matat product that provides you with some important features if you want to have an AI assistant that will help you generate and create beautiful block posts but this is a separate product so if you want me to show this kind of content into another tutorial just drop me a line into the comment section below you can enable or disable this if you have a premium version of frankmat I believe that you have some credits of content AI included so you can enable this and just play around once you enable some modules you will see that the relative option here will appear into the drop- down menu under the rank matat SEO settings you see here content AI is now available but in my case I will leave it disable the second module here is the 404 monitor I strongly suggest you here to enable this and as you can see here I will have the option here appearing in the drop- down menu under rank matat SEO okay and we will see that one later on of course during the tutorial here we just enabling and disabling what we will need and you can also quickly access the settings right here then you have the ACF if you're using ACF on your website you need to enable this because it will kind of in create more deeply rank mat with ACF kind of helping helping rank matat recognize all your Advanced custom fields and so on so this is very important to enable if you're using ACF otherwise you can leave it disabled of course if you're using the am plugin you can enable this but we are not using this and we are not talking about this in this tutorial the analytics module is very very important and basically this is the module that will let you enable this tab here which is the tab that you are um that you can access once you connect the Google The Google account to rank mat we saw this in the setup Wizard and this is very important to do because you will kind of be able to retrieve a lot of information from Google search console and Google analytics and to see how your website is performing into the search engines basically on Google in this case of course you will see the site analytics the SEO performance you can track some keywords and you can track your ranking if you're using rank matat Pro okay now we go on to the dashboard we scroll down we see that the analytics tab is enabled perfect the body press and the BB press modules you just need them if you're using this kind of plugins in my case I'm not using them the image SEO is a very important module that will let you enable some Advanced features for your image SEO optimization like generating automatically the Altex and the description of your images for example the instant indexing so this one basically leave it enable the instant indexing is interesting because it's an advanced settings that will let you uh ping the um search engine as SE such as Bing and Yandex to let them know each time you publish a new content or you update some content on your website this is very very very useful then you have the link counter and this basically tells you how many links internal and external links are attached to each of your pages or posts this is very important then you have the local SEO even if you're are not working as a local business so with a physical address or with a physical store or with with a physical location in general you need this to be enabled if you want to have a Knowledge Graph the knowledge graph we just saw it before during the setup wiard and it's just kind of a stuff that appears when you type inside um the name of a business and you type about for example or when you type the name of a city for example New York City and uh basically the stuff that you see here in this kind of yeah Square to the right side of the page this is a knowledge graph which just contains some information about your your business or a city or a country or a topic in general and uh if your if your website is correctly set up you can basically tell Google to show this knowledge graph if Google wants to do so of course because it's always up to Google to choose if he wants to show the knowledge graph or not but if you set up everything correctly you will be able to do so and to do so you just need to enable this local SEO module so the open graph here if I type in PayPal about or any other business and I type about it will most likely appear here the knowledge graph this is the knowledge graph you see with the logo of the business the name of the business some information about the business here that are provided uh and some other information customer service number stock price Founders CEO and etc etc and you can you can basically tell Google's a lot of this information when you set up correctly the local SEO module on Rank matat and we will see it later around during the tutorial so leave this enable which is very important if you're publishing news on your website you need the pro version of rank matat and you can enable also this module same for podcasts and redirections this is very important so be careful and leave it enable we will see later on how to set up this kind of redirections when you need them because often there are some broken links on your website and you need to redirect the old broken links to the new ones then we have the schema structur data and keep this enabled because it's very important it will provide you some Advanced information to try to obtain some rich Snippets and basically Rich Snippets are all about stuff like this for example pizza pizza recipe and this is a rich snippet you see there is an image there is a rating here there is a number of reviews and there is also the time the preparation time so this is about recipes for example here you also have something else let me show you for example you have the number of ingredients you see and so basically here you have oh this is annoying you have 16 ingredients you have the time preparation time and uh down here you have always the votes and so on yes basically all these are Advanced schema uh Rich Snippets sorry so if to if you want to obtain also the rich Snippets for your kind of content if you're publishing recipes videos or even a simple blog post you want to enable the schema structur data this is very very powerful and very important most of the schema is taken care rank matter has taken care of it automat ially so you do not need to uh to fill any strange codes of or data and you will also have many Advanced features if you're using rank matat Pro so LIF this enable we'll scroll down here if you want to have the role manager active you can enable this here and as always once you enable this here you will see the relative option appearing here popping up here in the menu of rank mats in my case I will leave it disabled the SEO analyzer it's a quick and easy tool that you can enable to analyze your website we will see it quickly later on during the video and so leave it enable the sitemap feature is very very very useful and important is kind of crucial for your website SEO so leave it is enable the video s map unfortunately in my case it's just available for the pro version so I will leave it disable and if I scroll down here I have the Google web stories which is not interesting for me right now and the vcommerce module if you're using W Commerce on your website and you're selling products you want to enable this this is very very important so enable this and just proceed with the next steps remember that many of these modules are just for the pro version but even some modules that are enabled for the pre version when you enable the pro version you will have any many many many more feature available of course so we're ready now to dive deeper into the general settings titles and meta and many other interesting stuff to set up rank mat okay so now you've just done the basic stuff so we will just need to dive deeper into the rank match general settings it is quite tricky sometimes you have some tricky information settings and stuff that maybe you're not used or familiar to if you're not an SEO expert but don't worry because I will guide you step by step and of course you will always have the rank mat documentation at your side which is pretty well done and I love it personally so let's dive in we will start now our settings going to general settings here so we go to rank matat SEO and general settings and from this tab we will be able to configure a lot of General stuff which is very important for your SEO here in the links tab we can find some important information and some very delicate settings you see here you can strip the first option here is to strip C category base okay in general when you do not know how if you want to do something or not you have to click here on the link all these links brings you to the documentation to the rank mat knowledge base which is very very well done and uh you can basically you can go here each time you do not know if you have to do or not a setting on your website in this case this is a very simple setting as you can see here it simple strips away the category from the URL you see here this sentence and it cleans the URL like this let me show you an example for example here in my blog categories I go to my posts categories and as you see here I have a few categories and if I go and try to visit them D Link the URL it has no category inside so this is happening because I'm using this rank M option while if I was not using it I will see my URL this way category slash name of the category so basically this is just a way to simplify your url structure but keep in mind that if you already have a website that is indexed and you are indexing your website using the classic category URL you have to be careful because you have to Simply base uh create some redirection from the old structure of the URL to the new one we will see how redirection Works later on during the tutorial so if you want to do so you can you have the all the information to do it so this one be careful if it just um if it is just for you the beginning of the website creation or the website is not yet indexed by Google you can basically do it without any problem if your website is already indexed and all your category pages are already indexed you have to be careful and to place some redirection from the old URL to the new one like this you see okay so this is also well explained into the documentation so if you need to dive deeper you can do it by reading it and then what happens make sure to check also in your peral link settings to uh select the peral link structor to post name of course all this settings that are um how do you say are to manage your URLs are very very delicate and best practice is to do it before publishing your website of course so be be be sure to to choose here the postn name structure which is the most common in U in nowadays and it's the best one for SEO in general and be sure also here to check you do not need to to put inside here anything because rank mat is stripping away the the category base if you have enabled this sting here and otherwise you can change the C category and tag base right here if you want to do so but in my case is perfect because I will leave it stri category base like this okay of course it's important to know that this is not a vital option so it's just more than um a kind of visual option that you can uh use to Strat your URLs and if you use a lot your categories it's good to have it have them simplified like this so just choose if it is the option right for your website here we have the redirect attachments setting which is very important so leave this enable and what it do is basic basically redirect all the attachment pages that WordPress generates automatically each time you upload an image or a file and it will redirect this URLs directly to the post that they appear in because each time you upload an image or a file to WordPress media folder it will create kind of a page like this one which is called attachment and that contain that kind of media for example in my case here this image is contained in this weird page like right here and I do not need this page it's kind of completely un useful and so I just need to redirect this attachment page to the post or the page that will contain this image of course so in my case if I enable this if I uh if uh if I try to visit this kind of attachment pages I will just land on the pages that will they will contain the media and if that kind of media are not contained in any page of my website or in any post of my website they will land on the homepage because I can set up here the redirect orphan attachments so basically all the images and files that has no pages that because they are not included in any page or post on my website they will be redirected to the homepage this is very important so keep it like this and enable this like this down here we have the no follow external links as I explain to you at the beginning of the tutorial this is a very uh delicate option because basically if you enable this you are telling Google to uh not give credit to all the websites that you are linking that are external websites to your website so for example if in my blog post I link to a page of element.com for example or to elegant tees.com I am if I enable this option here I'm just telling Google that I do not want to pass some credit and some link juice to these websites so I think that this is kind of a massive option that in some cases can be useful and in other cases not because of course if you pass some credit to to the external websites can also be a good best practice so just choose if it is something you want or not I would suggest you not to enable this if you do not know what to do in this case because it's always good to uh to pass some some link juice in uh in the in the majority of cases of course here no follow image file links if you're using external images and you do not want to pass credit on the links on the websites that are actually um hosting that images you need to enable this option right here otherwise you can leave it disabled and here this is also a good option I will suggest you to leave it enabled because this option will try to analyze all the links that you have in your pages and posts and will basically make them open in a new tab so this is a a good good option perfect to leave it enable save changes now the second setting here is breadcrumbs and you can enable this setting here if you want to use this short code and place it into your for example into your blog post template or if your theme or page builder supports frankm breadcrumbs you will find a module that you can insert in your pages or posts and this can be a very good best practice to enhance the uh SEO structure of your blog post for example let me show you here a quick example in this blog post template I have inserted the breadcrumbs right here and I can place them for example before the post content before the title is always a good a good place to place them and uh let's see how you can do so it's very easy in this case for example let's say that I want to create brecs in my reviews template so I go to this bloxy Pro review and let's say that I want to enable the breadcrumb right here above the title I have to go inside the post template in my case so I go and open the single post template okay and I simply change it from here I simply insert my breadcrumbs in my case I see that I do not have breadcrumbs okay and I do not have any rank mat rank okay I just need to insert the short code so I simply drag and drop my short code right here okay and I use this short code which is very easy copy and paste rank mat brrum short code this one okay and let's paste it inside here now since I see that there is um a spacing down here I go to the advanced tab I unlink here and I place it minus 30 pixels and in a very easy way I've inserted a breadcrumb structure like this so I save I go and have a preview I go to my reviews I select this one and if I empty the cache I will see my breadcrumbs appearing above the title great you see here this is a very good way to make people know where they are into our website and what is the structor of our blog post for example this is the title of the blog post this is the category in which the blog post is contained and this is the main page of the website we can also make sure sure that we can customize all this bre breadcrumb structure by simply going back here to the breadcrumbs and when we enable them we can choose a different separator here for example if I place this one it will be different and we will see it we can also choose to have a custom one if you want in my case I will use this one or yes it will be also nice to insert some some kind of arrows for example let me see if I have one here this one for example okay this one is nice and then um we can show or hide the homepage link which is the link uh right here you see we can show or hide it we can also show um a different homepage label for example the title of the website okay then we c