Optimizing the SEO title and meta description of every single one of your posts, pages, and other types of content is a lot of work. The Yoast SEO plugin makes these processes easier for you! In Yoast SEO, you can use variables to set templates for your SEO titles and meta descriptions. After setting a template, the plugin will generate an SEO title and a meta description following that template for each of your posts and pages!
The template variables feature is available for free. But, if you are serious about your site Yoast SEO Premium can help you make your job a lot easier.
A variable is a name or a symbol that stands for a value. For example, Yoast SEO uses the variable sitename to get the site name from the site itself. In this way, you don’t have to type in this information by hand.
With Yoast SEO, you can use these variables to set templates for your SEO titles and meta descriptions. After you’ve come up with a template, the plugin will generate and optimize all of your SEO titles and meta descriptions.
So, how do you set a template for your SEO titles and meta descriptions? You go to the ‘Search Appearance’ settings of Yoast SEO and click ‘Content Types’. Then, you can change the template for all of the content types you have on your site, like posts, pages, and taxonomies.
You can change the templates to whatever you feel fits your goal. You can check this article for a step-by-step explanation of how to modify default snippet templates in Yoast SEO.
For posts on yoast.com, this template leads to SEO titles like this:
This also means you can easily change large batches of SEO elements. If you would change your site’s name, you would normally have to change your SEO titles to reflect your new name manually. But if you use Yoast SEO’s variable sitename in your SEO title template, the variable will get the new name, and you won’t have to edit every single one of your SEO titles manually. This saves you a lot of time!
If you want, you can also use variables to edit the SEO title and meta description in the Google preview in Yoast SEO. Just click ‘Google preview’ in the Yoast SEO sidebar while editing your post, and you’ll find the SEO title and meta description according to the variables you’ve chosen. Here, you’ll get the option to override that metadata with a custom-made variant if you think that will attract more clicks in the search results.
Yoast SEO supports a wide range of variables and they can be used for almost any situation. There are even variables for use with WooCommerce, so you can extract product information from your store to use in the metadata. You can find an overview of all the available snippet variable types here.
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