I have a site that doesn't rank in Google. After a lot of research, the only reason seems to be because of the fact that I have built the site in Dreamweaver and used a template for all my pages. What this means is that the meta name, and meta keywords and the same for every page and so all my pages but the first are supplemental. So i need to make each page more unique, and what I've been told I need is variable HTML tags, but I've no idea what to do or how to make them variable for each of my pages. Any help would be appreciated.
The files that are created are HTML files, you can edit the source code in Dreamweaver or by rightclicking the file -> Open with... and use a text editor. Near the top you will have some tags such as <HTML><title>..etc, look for the <META ... >tags and edit them accordingly. THen reupload the site to your server. There are lots of tutorials on basic HTML and Meta tags, just google it. Oh, just wanted to add. You would still get indexed by Google even if your meta tags are the same, they aren't given much weights by search engines. Look at your content and on-page SEO and build backlinks. This will index you and improve your rank.
Would there be a benefit at all at trying to optimize them? My site is php driven with the same meta tags for each page, I'm just wondering if there would be any improvement at all to changing things.
Every little bit can help. It's always good practice to make sure your meta tags are correct. If anything it would help people using search engines to get a better idea of what your site is before clicking your link.
But even if you meta tags are the same, the content itself should tell Google that the pages are different right?
Yes, google will definitely tell if the pages are different. The only thing the general META tags (description/keywords) do is give the search engines a basic idea of what the site is about. The SE's can choose not to even use these tags (many don't use keyword tag anymore) when compiling information on your site.
The poster has got it spot on here. It is VERY important for each page of your site to have unique titles and meta descriptions.
Having unique title tags is even more important though. Searchers will see the title-tag, the description tag will be ignored by google in many (not all) cases.
The description tag is used as the snippet next to your search result in Google. This makes it very important.
In most cases, if Google doesn't find the description tag, it will use whatever text comes first from your page as its description in search results, which is usually your menu items. If you don't want your sites search result snippet to be "Home - FAQ - About..etc" you should use the META description tag.
use each individual page to your advantage, optimise each page for a different set of keywords to give yourself more scope in the search engines.