Custom variables and WordPress

I have WordPress installed but it’s only controlling the blog part of my site and the themes, the rest of the pages are hand coded.
The URL to pages are like mydomain.com/wp/folder/page.php
I don’t use WordPress pages.

I’m trying to optimise my site for search engines, by having two variables made at the top of one of my custom pages and echoing the variables for the meta & title tags.
https://lirae.co.uk/wordpress-support.txt
^ the top part of that code is what I have on my actual pages
The second part {under the ~~~~~}, is in my header.php for my themes; it’s supposed to print the custom variables I set in my pages.

If I set a variable in the header.php and print it in the footer.php, nothing happens…so I think WordPress is, for some reason, eating my variables.
I even tried naming the variables stuff like “liraecustomsubtitle” and “liraecustomkeywords” but they still won’t work. =\

Is there anything I have to do to get WordPress to stop eating my variables?