I use a few different CMS's none of them provide an option however to add individual page meta's.. I started to add atleast a site description to the main site meta though, because google seems to be pulling from a crappy blog... But previously, I did this with a forum (PHPbb) I downloaded a lil meta hack.. which had nearly all of my pages omitted as like pages in the serps.. should I add the meta.. leave it how it is... The blogs are built into the CMS, theyre indexed, theyre free content.. should I delete them.. How do I get google to look on the index only for description? (Blogs are dynamic, so a small portion of the latest blog post does appear on the index... but waaaaaaaaaaaay down in the bottom left hand corner.) Question in a nutshell... Use a sitewide description meta or dont. ~LadyH
many believe that if you use a "site wide meta" google will view your pages as being the same. If you can unique page description/key word tags are the way to go IMO.
like you, I too use a CMS (E107) and am stuck with sitewide Meta, but it certainly hasn't hurt me in the Serps, beating out all the major automotive news resources, blogs and general sites. Even the manufacturers. I know I should try to fix that (if I had the slightest clue how) and that in some way unknown to me, it is alledgedly hurting me, but for now... I see no ill effects.
Yeah a friend mentioned that to me today as well, but I'm not really interested in changing the CMS for indexed and ranked sites... sooo just gotta make this one work It really is a better CMS as far as everything but SEO goes, I do most of my own SEO, and am decent @ it.. it's programming and coding I suck with.. so ... I'll have to work that out somewhere here..
Individual meta descriptions can be useful for a few reasons - getting higher CTR when you pop up in serps and also, it may be helping some pages stay out of sups. There are probably 101 more important things you could do for seo before worrying about meta descriptions, however.
Just as long as U do. Unique Titles and Meta Descriptions can be a pretty good boost.. worth it to have... ( and SEF URLs)
You should have totally unique meta tags for each and every page on your site, if not for Google, then at least for Yahoo! as the latter considers meta tags very important.