Rank Math SEO is our top recommended plugin for Search Engine Optimization here at TKD Design. Search Engine Optimization is the name of the game when it comes to advertising your products and services on the Internet and promoting your website and brand. Without it, you are sure to not rank very high in search engine results, making it very difficult to accomplish either of those essential goals.
But how should you go about optimizing your website’s posts and pages? How do you know how to optimize? Well, that’s what Rank Math is here for.
Why is an SEO plugin like Rank Math necessary?
An SEO plugin is essential in making sure your pages and posts are ranking high on the big search engine results! SEO plugins provide a comprehensive framework of all the necessary and recommended actions one should take when optimizing their blog posts and pages, to ensure they are reaching the most potential viewers and ranking high on SERP’s.
What makes Rank Math better than other SEO plugins?
Rank Math and Yoast are both highly regarded plugins among web designers, and both have very desirable qualities. At TKD Design, we use RankMath exclusively across our clients’ websites.
Rank Math is a highly valuable SEO plugin, as it has an easy to follow setup wizard, modular framework, a high performance speed, and an excellent customer support aspect. It is easy to use and very clear cut, making it easier than ever to optimize your posts and pages!
How does the Rank Math Plugin work?
When using Rank Math to optimize your blog posts and web pages, here is some advice!
The first section of the Rank Math dashboard (this dashboard will appear on any post and page you create) contains the basics of SEO. For this example, we will look at TKD Design’s previous post, “17 Amazing WordPress Plugins Your Website Needs”.
First, choose a Focus Keyword for your article or for your page. This tells Rank Math which keyword you would most like to attempt to rank high for.
You will want to make sure that this keyword (ignoring your other secondary focus keywords for a moment) is present in your SERP title, your meta description, and your post’s URL.
You will also want to make sure you introduce your focus keyword into your content early, as you are writing your post or page. Lastly, to meet the necessary threshold for a fair ranking, you will want to make sure your content is at least 600 words long.
Next, Rank Math will look to optimize for the finer details of Search Engine Optimization, like keyword density and internal/external links, as pictured below.
You will want to make sure your focus keyword is present in an adequate density (more details on this here). You will also want to include both internal and external links in your content, as when big search engines like Google crawl your content, they look at the links you use as a sign of your page’s “authority” on a particular keyword.
Adding external links is a significant part of creating an SEO network with other websites — plus, adding a backlink for another website will show a search engine’s algorithm that your information is more credible. Be mindful when adding external links, however, as there are two types of external links: no-follow and do-follow.
You will want a mix of both to increase your chances of ranking! Learn more about the difference between no-follow and do-follow links here.
Finally, there are the tiny details that really make a difference in your SEO ranking, that many can gloss over! These aspects include things like title and content readability – both of these are considered very important to search algorithms.
A lot of SEO ranking factors stem from your SERP title. This being said, you will want to make sure that your chosen focus keyword is not only present in your SERP title but also prominent in it – you will want to make sure this keyword is at the beginning of your SERP title.
Also, typically, big search engines like Google and Bing look to make sure that they are providing the best results for their users. This means they will often rank articles and pages with positive or negative sentiments, power words, and numbers in a SERP title higher than those without.
Using our same example from earlier, here is an excellent template for a SERP title that will meet all title readability criteria.
17 Amazing WordPress Plugins Your Website Needs
The word Amazing in this SERP serves as both a positive sentiment and as a power word for our title.
17 meets our number requirement (search algorithms love to see numbers, as numbers in the SERP title usually indicate a numbered list, and therefore, indicating content readability).
You will also see that our focus keyword, WordPress Plugins, is present towards the beginning of our SERP title.
As for content readability, this is vital to your SEO, and also to your reader’s experience (which should be important to you and is very important to search engines). This can be simplified by installing a Table of Contents plugin, like Lucky WP Table of Contents, to clarify any written content. You will also want to break up long paragraphs into short ones, and place relevant images and videos into your content as well. SEO should not be about keyword cramming – it’s about user experience!
What is the best optimization method through Rank Math?
With every post or page you write, Rank Math will help you to optimize your post to gain the maximum amount of traffic by giving you strategic recommendations, based on your content.
The process should begin by writing page and blog content first, then optimizing from there. Some also optimize the post while they write it, but we at TKD Design find writing content first to be more efficient, and more straightforward.
Once you’ve written your page’s or post’s content, the first step in the SEO process is to select the right focus keywords.
The first focus keyword that you add is the Primary Focus Keyword (the main focus of your article or page), and the rest are considered secondary focus keywords, or keywords that you would also like RankMath to rank for, but ones that aren’t essential to your page’s or post’s content.
That being said, you will know you have reached a desirable ranking based on this color code:
A Green tick in front of a test means that you have met all criteria for that test, and are good to go in that area!
If you see the color Yellow on a test, that means your post isn’t entirely optimized for the test, even though it is better than nothing, you may want to consider looking into how to further optimize your post or page for that criteria.
A Red cross icon means your post has not met test criteria. It is highly recommended that you spend some time to completely optimize your content before you publish, to maximize the chances of higher traffic and rankings.
SEO is, and always has been, a very complicated undertaking, sometimes regardless of one’s web design experience. However, SEO plugins like Rank Math exist to make our lives easier! Take the first step – contact TKD Design today to have your website’s traffic boosted significantly, and start reaching new potential customers!
