How to Change Your WordPress Site’s Title Attribute, Site-Wide, Using the Yoast SEO Plugin

by Jason Swett,
  1. If you haven’t already done do, install the Yoast SEO Plugin.
  2. In your website’s admin area, find the SEO menu item on the left. (It should be near the bottom, below Settings.) Hover over the SEO menu item (or click on it) and then click the Titles & Metas submenu item.
  3. Click the Post Types tab. Note that there are three sets of fields here: one for Posts, one for Pages and one for Media. You’re probably interested in Posts and Pages.
  4. Under the Posts section, notice that the Title template field will probably say something like %%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%. This might look kind of crazy and confusing to you, so I’ll give you an example of what this might work out to. If your company is called Ben Franklin Labs and the visitor is viewing, say, your About page, the title might work out to this: “About | Ben Franklin Labs.” That cryptic %%sep%% stands for separator and the default appears to be “|” (called a pipe character). In the next step we’ll change the title from something like “About | Ben Franklin Labs” to “About | Grand Rapids Web Design and Web Development | Ben Franklin Labs.”
  5. For my example, I chose to add “Grand Rapids Web Design and Web Development” because those are terms I’d like my entire site to rank for in Google, and because Ben Franklin Labs actually is a web design/development company. If you’re, say, a wedding photographer, you might like to use “[Your Town] Wedding Photographer.” Once you’ve decided what phrase you’d like to insert into your title, change the Title template field under the Posts section from %%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%% to %%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% <strong>Your Phrase Here %%sep%%</strong> %%sitename%%. (I made the new part bold.)
  6. Repeat step 5 for the Pages section.
  7. Verify that your changes worked by viewing at least one blog post and at least one page. Your new phrase should appear in the title attribute for both.

2 thoughts on “How to Change Your WordPress Site’s Title Attribute, Site-Wide, Using the Yoast SEO Plugin

  1. Pinku Kumar

    How to change pagination title? As it is showing ->> SiteName – Page 2 of 62 – SiteName

    Here I don’t like to repeat SiteName. But in latest yoast there is not option to change.

    Please tell me..

    Reply

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