Understanding Rank Math's Meta Box Appearing in Single Posts & Pages - Rank Math SEO

Key Takeaways

rankmath's meta box gives you all the options you need to handle on-page seo as you write your posts and pages right from the editor hi i'm kate and i'm about to show you an overview of this feature for wordpress's gutenberg and classic editors let's see how to get to it in both in gutenberg's sidebar click on the ranked math seo icon for the page or click on the three vertical dots in the top right hand corner of the edit page and select rank math in the plugins section in classic editor you'll need to scroll down a bit and then you'll find the meta box right below the main content now that you know where to locate rank math let's take a look at each of the tabs in detail there are timestamps in the description in case you wish to see a specific setting the general tab has the following items the preview shows how that page looks in both desktop and mobile search results focus keyword is where you'll add the keyword that serves as the base for the seo score click on the card to learn more about what a focus keyword is and how to use it to optimize your content then there's the pillar content checkbox that you should check if you want that post to appear in link suggestions for other posts in the same category finally there are four sections in the content analysis basic seo looks for the focus keyword in different places of the content additional seo goes into more detail with the focus keyword as well as checking for links in the text and the page's url length title readability has tips to make your title more appealing and improve your click-through rate commonly known as ctr and last but not least content readability has suggestions to make your text more pleasant for all kinds of readers the advanced tab tells search engines how to behave once they find the content its first section is robots meta which should be used when you want this poster page to use tags different from the ones that had been determined in the global meta section of rank math's titles and meta settings robots meta are tags that have been around for a long time and suggest to search engines if they should follow their standard behavior on your website keep in mind that most of the search bots follow these suggestions however malicious spots might not rank math supports six of the most important robots meta tags the first two index and no index tell the search engine if it should add that page to its index since both of them can't be active at the same time once you select one the other will be disabled automatically the third tag nofollow is related to crawling which means using links to go from one website to another the nofollow tag tells search bots that none of the links on that page should be followed that means they should ignore the links and not establish any relationship between your website and their destinations if you want some of the links on that page to be followed you can add the attribute to specific links instead of the whole page no archive should be used if you don't want google to store a cached version of that page you can see if google has that page in cache using rankmath's quick actions menu and request a recall if you've made any major changes though it might take a while for google to update the cached version or to remove your page from the archive if you enable this option no image index as the name says prevents all the images in that page from being indexed this means they won't appear in image search results which could be used to preserve your crawl budget prevent plagiarism and theft or if you want users to only consume content from your website the last option no snippet allows you to restrict search engines from showing snippets from your posts for most search engines snippets just mean your made a description the little piece of text that appears below the url of the ranking result it's commonly used by sites that make revenue through ads such as news outlets or coupon affiliate websites the second part advanced robots meta has three options to help you manage your website's search snippets if you wish to learn more about these tags we've added a link in the video's description with google's documentation on this topic now let's go through the options max snippet robots meta lets you define the maximum characters you are willing to let google use for a snippet from your page the default option is set to -1 which means unlimited if you prefer to add a limit just change the number the max video preview advanced robots mate attack lets you configure the maximum duration in seconds that a video preview should have this applies not only to videos from your own server but also to embed videos from websites such as youtube finally max image preview lets you configure what size of images google should use from the page large standard or if they shouldn't use any images at all moving on to the third section canonical url here is where you'll define which url search engines should index for that content in case the same page can be reached for multiple urls for example a post can have a simple slug with just its name a tag or a category and so on the canonical tag stops search engines from indexing duplicate content which would make the post compete against itself for ranking the redirect option makes the pages permalink redirect the visitors to another page it is disabled by default if you activate it two fields will appear first the redirection type second the url for the new destination page you can learn all about redirection types and how to use rank math's redirections tool with the video that's on the card then comes an option that's only available if you have enabled breadcrumbs in rank math's general settings in the breadcrumbs tab breadcrumbs are links or text that show the path from a major page to minor ones such as blog posts if even when the option is enabled you don't see breadcrumbs you might need to add code to your theme's files we recommend consulting your theme provider for help on where exactly the code goes we made a video with all of the breadcrumbs options click on the card to watch it regarding the option in the advanced tab of rank math's meta box you can change how the name of that page appears in the breadcrumbs by adding your custom title in this field the last option show seo score on front end also appears only if you've enabled it in rank math's general settings it's in the others tab it shows the seo score that ranked math gives that page or post based on the options configured in the meta box the one we're covering here in this video now on to the third tab where you'll configure the schema markup schema is a way to organize your page's data that helps search engines understand what your content is about when you mark up a page using this structured data search engines can create rich snippets they are highlights in your content that appear directly on search results for instance a frequently asked questions box by default you will see the schema markup selected in rank math's titles and meta pages and posts will have the option schema type in their respective tabs if your website has custom post types they will have tabs of their own rank math automatically detects if you install woocommerce or similar plugins and also adds the appropriate schema to your product pages different fields will appear depending on the type of schema you choose for that post type you can set up variables that will serve as default in the meta box now let's customize that markup in the editor to delete the one that was already there click on the trash icon next to the schema type you can switch types by clicking on the paper and pencil icon rank math3 users can also click on schema generator to change the type pro users can have multiple schema types for the same article so every time they click on it a new type will be added we have an article explaining all the types of schema including the ones only available for ranked math pro users it's available in the description once you select a type the panel will show those fields that you set up in the titles and meta tab plus others to customize for that particular post besides having more than one schema type for the same page or article rank math pro users have access to further features importing schema from a live web page or adding code both in html or json ld creating custom schema which can be saved as a template and used on multiple pages an advanced schema editor and the code validation tool where you can see the actual json ld code for the schema on the page to make sure everything is correct the social tab helps you add open graph metadata which is a protocol created by facebook that formats your content to be shared on social networks both in profiles or through direct messages currently what you set up in the facebook options applies to all of the networks that use open graph including instagram whatsapp linkedin etc you can learn more about opengraph through the link in the description we also have a separate options for twitter since it requires different tags than most of the other social networks first we'll take a look at the settings that apply to both social networks we'll start with the thumbnail which deserves attention because social networks have their own recommended dimensions and ratio for images the recommended image size for social networks that use opengraph is 1200 pixels wide and 630 pixels tall twitter allows minimum dimensions of 600 pixels wide by 335 pixels tall but you can use the same image from facebook without any issue another factor is the file size we suggest keeping the file under 300 kilobytes because anything above that might not show up in whatsapp when sharing links next comes the title the same title doesn't necessarily work for seo and social because in search engines people are looking for specific information using keywords on the other hand in social media visitors usually stumble onto the content so the title should be more alluring instead of practical the third field description is also important because search engines and social media channels have different recommended lengths so the description as well as the title could be cut off if it's too long finally add icon overlay to thumbnails is a rank math feature that can skyrocket your click-through rate on facebook if used correctly this option adds an overlay to your image making it look like a video or a playable gif visitors might click on the image to make it play and will be redirected to your post make sure to have the video or gif at the beginning of the page rather than at the end so your visitors don't leave the page immediately facebook is hard on pages that give people an unsatisfactory experience and reduces their reach frequently so this feature should never be used as a simple clickbait trick the twitter tab starts with the option use data from facebook tab which is enabled by default to save your time when you disable this all settings that are taken from the facebook tab are also disabled and you'll see options to add image title description and icon overlay there is an extra option for twitter card type here are all the card types supported in ranked math first summary card with large image has a headline below the image similar to facebook while the summary card features a small thumbnail placed to the left of the title and description the app card is specifically designed for mobile apps with several fields to customize depending on the device used to access the tweet finally the player card is for when you want to embed videos on twitter this also requires some setup and you need approval from twitter to use this card type you will find details about all of these fields in the knowledge base article that corresponds to this video the link is in the description if this tutorial helped you give it a like if you have any questions click on the link in the description to open a free support ticket you can find more tutorials in our knowledge base at rankmath.com kb