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Set up titles and descriptions: templates, variables and per-post overrides
How SEO titles and meta descriptions are built, how to write templates for whole kinds of pages with variables like %title% and %sitename%, and how a single post overrides them.
Time
15 minutes
What you need
- The plugin installed
- No other SEO plugin printing titles (or deactivate it after importing)
The SEO title and meta description are what Google shows for your page. You can set them one post at a time, or write a template that fills them in for a whole kind of page, such as every post or every category.
The order things are decided in
- The post's own SEO title and description (in the editor). These always win.
- The template for that kind of page (Settings, Titles & social).
- What WordPress and your theme do today, if the template is empty.
A template left empty changes nothing. The one default that does something: date archives are set to noindex, because they only repeat your posts.
Write a template
- Open OnlyAI SEO, Settings, Titles & social.
- Under Home page, Posts, pages and other content types, Categories, tags and other archives and Author, date, search and 404 pages, fill in a Title and a Meta description where you want one.
- Pick a Separator (for example
-or|). - Press Save.
Examples: %title% %sep% %sitename% for posts, %term% archive %sep% %sitename% for categories, Results for %searchterm% %sep% %sitename% for search results.
The variables
| Variable | Becomes |
|---|---|
| %title% | The post, page or archive title |
| %sitename% | Your site title |
| %tagline% | Your site tagline |
| %sep% | The separator you picked |
| %year% | The current year |
| %excerpt% | The post's excerpt |
| %category% | The post's main category |
| %author% | The author's name |
| %date% | The post date |
| %term%, %term_desc% | The category or tag name and its description |
| %pt%, %pt_plural% | The content type's name, singular and plural |
| %searchterm% | What the visitor searched for |
| %page% | The page number on paged lists |
Categories, tags and other archives
On each term's edit screen there are three extra fields: an SEO title, a meta description and a hide from search results box. They win over the archive template.
Hide pages from search (noindex)
- One page: in the editor, Search & social (OnlyAI SEO) has noindex, nofollow, no cached copy and no text snippet switches and a canonical field.
- A whole kind of page: tick Hide all of these from search results for a content type or taxonomy, or noindex author and date archives.
- Anything marked noindex is left out of the XML sitemap, so you do not send mixed signals.
- Only set a canonical URL when the same content truly lives at another address you want search engines to prefer. A wrong canonical can make a page disappear from results.
Tips for good ones
- Put the focus keyword near the start of the title. Keep descriptions between about 70 and 160 characters and say what the reader gets.
- Do not write a template that repeats your site name three times.
%title% %sep% %sitename%is enough for most sites. - Let the plugin do the first draft: 1-click SEO writes a title and description from your text; the CTR Fixer agent rewrites ones that earn too few clicks.
Several languages?
With Polylang or WPML, every template is handed to the language plugin as a string you can translate. Guide.