Full integration with Elementor
The integration with the Elementor visual editor is complete, smooth and responsive.
When both plugins are installed and activated, a new SEO settings tab appears in Elementor that allows you to access all the Rank Math Meta Box settings in the same way you can find them in both the classic editor and the Gutenberg block editor.
Watermarking of images shared on social networks
When people say that Rank Math has a lot of options, they are not fooling you. There are so many, that reviewing them one by one would be an eternal tome. Here you have the list of things you can do with it.
A curious thing, and one that can be quite useful, is the possibility of adding a watermark to the images that are shared on Facebook and Twitter.
This can be used to add branding, signatures or image or video playback icons, although for Facebook they warn the following:
"Be careful with this option. Although this option will help to increase the CTR on Facebook, it could be penalised if overused.
I have tried to add a bigger transparent watermark to centre it and it has given some errors in Elementor, it is pending to test it better.
This is how the logo is added in the top left corner.
Options to get bored
But the real kicker is in its modules, you can deactivate the ones you don't need so that the plugin consumes less resources. Everything is now much better organized than the last time I used it.
You have modules for SEO for WooCommerce, bbPress and BuddyPress, for local SEO and Knowledge Graph and ACF compatibility, among many other things, all of them generous in configurations.
These are just some of the tools only available in the Pro version that I've already tested for three days.
Schema, structured data
One of its main claims, it is presented as the most powerful and advanced schema generator.
Schema Markup provides additional information about your blog to search engines.
In a nutshell, Schema Markup is a standardised vocabulary that you can add to your blog's HTML to help search engines understand what your content is about and reflect it in the SERP (search engine results pages).
At Rank Math Pro this module has been designed to include structured data in the entries without complications, in just a few clicks. It includes many Schema types and you can also set a default category in the configuration.
In his blog you can find a complete user guide so you don't get lost among its many options.
A paradise for data junkies, connected to your Google accountThe plugin dumps and presents all this information in a way that you can interpret it at a glance.
While many highlight this feature for its usefulness, I still prefer to consult the stats at my leisurely pace in their respective sources where appropriate.
Dashboard view of the analytics dashboard
<h3">404 Monitor
This is where broken pages are monitored which result in a negative user experience and also affect SEO.
It has two modes, Simple and Advanced.
The simple mode only shows a list of broken links and the advanced mode adds information about the referring URL and the user agent. This is useful to get clues about the source of the error and see if it is a real 404 or if it is someone mistyping an address by mistake.
However, there is a warning that the advanced mode, as it collects more information, consumes more resources. It is advisable to activate it for the time necessary to detect specific real errors and then return to simple mode.
Don't get obsessed, many of these 404 warnings are visitor typing errors, half-witted crawler bots or, as in my case, references to missing image sizes that are no longer in use.
For this example just remove the reference to that thumbnail in the post. Depending on what you are interested in, you can either remove the ad from the list or endorse it with a redirect.
Redirects
Essential function. Although this can be done manually, it is more laborious and delicate.
Rank Math Pro makes this job as easy and quick as ticking an option and the task will be done automatically.
If you need to change the slug of a published post, the plugin will automatically create a 301 redirect. Never again will you leave dead links by mistake or forgetfulness.
In addition, it will display this warning on the redirects created when visiting the link (only if you are an administrator). The visitor will simply be redirected without waiting. You will also be able to consult the list of redirects in case you want to delete them or modify them again at any time.
Image SEO
Another option to keep in mind. Image SEO is something that some people don't pay attention to or don't give it the importance it really has. In my case it is vital. A good part of the organic traffic I receive comes from images.
It is common that over time we neglect the boring task of filling in these image fields and it has not occurred to us to automate it, at least for the new images that we upload.
One day you discover that you have hundreds or thousands of orphaned Alt and Title and solving it by hand can mean hundreds of hours of work.
Rank Math Pro allows you to automatically add those missing ALT and Title (and other) attributes to all images at once while preserving the ones you already added and you can also add new ones manually at any time because this automatism will only continue to act on empty fields.
From now on, you can forget about it and fix them without haste knowing that at least they are no longer empty.
With this function, you can avoid installing one of the two or three existing plugins for this purpose, which are either cumbersome or do not allow for very advanced configuration.
Until today I have been solving this with a snippet graf that only added the ALT (using the title of the post) to the images that didn't have it. The options in Rank Math PRO go much further.
Sitemap, news and video
Another interesting function, which is further expanded in the PRO version.
In addition to being able to create the general sitemap.xml (which includes references to the number of images contained in each article), a news map and a video map can be generated.
The latter two will appear in the general map. All of this is also highly configurable.
The plugin also takes care of chunking the maps into the quantity of your choice (they recommend blocks of maximum 200 links) and generating and adding thumbnails to the video map.
Affiliate program
Disclaimer
Some of the links in this article are affiliate links.
As almost all plugins with Premium version also have affiliate programme. The selection process is not automatic, it is subject to an evaluation of the potential affiliate to know the profile of their channels.They offer 30% of each sale made from your links and pay when you accumulate earnings of at least 200 dollars.In addition, they do something a little different from the rest to encourage the activity of the users who review. They have a monthly contest in which they reward the best fixed article published and the best video telling the experience with the plugin. The best article is rewarded with 200 dollars and the best selected video also receives 200 dollars.
Winners for March and April
New pieces can be entered each month and the same person can win both prizes in one month. These prizes do not necessarily depend on whether the publication receives a lot of traffic. Here you have all the information about this monthly contest.PROS
- Reasonably priced
- Easy to set up
- Lots of useful options
- Activation/deactivation of modules
- Good documentation
CONS
- Although it is advertised as lighter than its competitors, in its Pro version, with all the modules active, the impact on the loading speed is too noticeable due to the increase in requests.
- Small bugs with some configuration in Elementor.
(Review in update)
