Title & Meta Templates
Set the default title and description patterns, with tokens.
Title and Meta Templates
Every page on your site needs a search title and a meta description. That is the clickable headline and the gray summary line Google shows in the results. Writing them by hand for hundreds of pages is not realistic, and blank ones let Google guess. Vibe SEO solves this with templates. You write one pattern per content type, and Vibe fills in the real title, site name, and summary for each page automatically. This lesson covers the "Search appearance defaults" card, where those templates live.
What templates are and why they matter
A template is a sentence with placeholders in it. Vibe calls the placeholders tokens. When a page loads, Vibe swaps each token for that page's real value. The default title template is:
%%title%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%
On a page called "Roof Repair," with a separator of " | " and a site name of "Davis Roofing," that renders as "Roof Repair | Davis Roofing." The default description template is %%excerpt%%, which pulls the page's own excerpt, trimmed to 160 characters.
These templates are fallbacks. If a page has its own title and description typed into its Vibe SEO box, that wins. The template only fills in when a page has nothing of its own. So one good template covers your whole site, and you still override individual pages when you want to.
Where it lives
In the WordPress admin, open the Vibe SEO menu and click Settings. The page is titled "Vibe SEO - Site Settings." Scroll to the card headed "Search appearance defaults." Everything in this lesson is on that one card, saved with one button.
The tokens
At the top of the card is a row of token buttons. Click one to drop it into whichever field you are editing. The buttons are:
- Page Title (
%%title%%) - the page or post title - Separator (
%%sep%%) - the divider you configure below - Site Name (
%%sitename%%) - your site's name - Tagline (
%%sitedesc%%) - your site's tagline - Excerpt (
%%excerpt%%) - the page's summary, capped at 160 characters - Category (
%%category%%) - the first category, on posts
In the fields, Vibe shows tokens in a friendly form like [Page Title] instead of the raw %%title%% code, so the templates stay readable. Everything that is not a token is treated as plain text you can type directly.
Step by step
- Set the Title separator first. The default is
|. Common alternatives shown on the card are-and·. Whatever you pick appears wherever%%sep%%sits in a template. - In the table below, you get one row per content type, usually Posts and Pages, each with a Title template and a Description template field.
- Click into a field, then click the token buttons to build your pattern, or type plain text between tokens.
- Watch the Preview line under each field. It shows exactly what a real page will render, using a recent post title and sample values, and it updates live as you type or change the separator.
- Repeat for each content type. A title without your site name and a description that stays empty are both worth fixing here.
- Click Save search appearance defaults. You will see a confirmation notice.
Social and archives
The same card has a "Social and archives" section that saves together with your templates.
- Default social image: paste an image URL. Vibe uses it as the Open Graph and Twitter Card image on any page that has no image of its own and no featured image.
- Thin archives: two checkboxes let you disable author archives and date archives, redirecting those thin, duplicate pages to your homepage so they stay out of search. These redirects only take effect while Vibe is your primary SEO plugin.
What a good result looks like
Every content type has a title template that ends with your site name through the separator, and a description template that produces a real sentence rather than a blank. Each Preview line reads like a clean search result with no leftover %%code%% and no dangling separator.
Pro tips and common mistakes
- Build templates with the token buttons, not by hand-typing
%%...%%. The friendly[Label]display is the correct on-screen form. - Vibe hard-strips any token it does not recognize and cleans up stray separators, so you never get "Title | " hanging at the end. This also scrubs old Yoast or Rank Math tokens left behind from a migration.
- Keep
%%title%%in every title template. A template that resolves to nothing leaves the page with no title. - Pages often have no excerpt, so a
%%excerpt%%description can come up short on them. Give important pages their own description in the Vibe SEO box. - Pick one separator and keep it consistent across every template for a uniform look in search.