h WordPress Plugins: SEO.

- [Voiceover] Hi, I'm Morten Rand-Hendriksen and welcome to WordPress Plugins: SEO. In this course we'll use two different plugins that can help your site be more shareable, and easier to find on social networks and in search engines. First, we'll look at the All in One SEO Pack plugin and use it as a basis to understand how SEO information can be added to your contentand then we'll step things up with the more powerful WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin for added functionality and more configuration options.

So let's get cracking with WordPress Plugins: SEO.

One of the first things people do after setting up a Wordpress site is install their favorite plugins. I do that and I'm sure you do too. But do you know what a plugin is and how it works?Let's take a quick look. A plugin is a small application that literally plugs in to your Wordpress installation to add new funcationality or features. Plugins are usually developed by other WordPress users who want to add something to the application but want to give people theoption whether they want to install it or not.

Think of them as apps for your WordPress site. This means you can install and uninstall plugins without changing WordPress itself. But keep in mind that if you deactivate or remove a plugin, the features it added disappear with it. Out of the box, WordPress comes with two plugins. The Akismet anti-spam plugin, and a demo plugin called Hello Dolly. You can install more plugins directly from the WordPress plugin directory, right from within your WordPress dashboard.

You do it by clicking on Add New down here. And here you can search for any plugin. What you're actually searching, is the wordpress.org plugin directory where you'll find all the approved plugins that are available for WordPress. You can also find thousands and thousands of other plugins on the web that are not necessarily approved. They may be for pay or they may be free. And you can download them and install them into Wordpress using the same installer here, just instead of searching for it, you click on the Upload function and then you can add in the plug-ins.

You can go deeper into this by checking out the Wordpress Essential Training course right here in the lynda.com library. Installing and activating plug-ins from the Wordpress dashboard is a straightforward process. Let's say you want to add a contact form to your site. All you do is search for that. So I'll search for contact form. Click Search plug ins. And I'll be provided with a list of all the available plugins I can add a contact form. But here, you see a common problem.

You have hundreds of plugins that do the same thing. So you need to figure out which plugin is the right one for you. You can do so by looking at the ratings. You see they have different star ratings. You can also go and click on Details to get more information about the plugin, and here you can also see the rating and all the breakdowns of what's going on with this plugin. If you don't like it, you simply close it down. If you don't find what you're looking for, you can change your search. I'm going to search for Grunion Contact Form and if you like what you see you can install it directly from this dashboard simply by clicking on Install Now.

You're asked if you want to install the plugin. The plugin gets downloaded into your server, unpacked, and installed into WordPress and from here you can now activate the plugin. And as you can see, the plug-in I just installed adds a new feature in the WordPress dashboard called feedbacks. And this is where all of the contact form information lands. So, when you install plugins, you install new features into wordpress. And that's what we'll be doing throughout the rest of this course.