This is what I understand.
If you need to define settings globally, you should define Options for the HTML/LaTeX exporters in org-publish-project-alist
inside .emacs
.
#+SETUPFILE
is to be used when you need to override global settings and define custom settings for few or a single file. If those settings are used frequently, you can define a template and use SETUPFILE to instruct org-mode to use the template to export this org file.
So I solved my problem by defining global settings in .emacs
and dropped the idea of using a global template
:author "Andy" :email "abc@gmail.com" :language "en" :link_home "index.html" :style "<link rel=\"stylesheet\" type=\"text/css\" href=\"css/style.css\" />