Importance of Unique Title Words?

really? also, is 12 the ideal number?

[Jakes Redding]

My small manufacturing company makes and sells small, blue widgets; big, blue widgets; small, green widgets; big, green widgets; etc. Not a lot of natural/distinctive variation in the product line. I have read it is important to have unique page titles, meta descriptions and keywords in the pages that make up a site. Question: how much variation is necessary for this uniqueness? If a page title has 12 words, but only one or two words is unique compared to other pages in site, is this enough? Other words could be changed somewhat randomly for the sake of uniqueness, but that would dilute keyword relevancy. Does uniqueness outweigh relevancy? Also, are the guidelines of 12 title words, 24 meta description words and 48 meta keywords important to follow? Penalty for exceeding these numbers? Thanks.

[Quadrille]

I don't believe all the stuff about magic numbers - and if you exceed whatever numbers matter to the SEs (see their guidelines, if they have any on this!), all extra will simply be ignored and / or cut off.

One key point about titles, very often missed, is that they should make sense to visitors, who may see them in their browsers, and certainly see them in the serps.

The titles should reflect the page content, and be unique.

If you can provide more than one page of content, a sentence or two of TITLE should not be a challenge!

For example, try:

Page title/keywords/keyphrase; section keyphrase, site title / keyphrase

Blue Widgets in Large and Automatic Widget Styles; standard colored widgets from The American Widget Company.

If the title looks stupid, visitor resistance will more than negate any SEO gain from stuffing that extra word in!

[stefano]

title: why don't you simply use "small blue widgets", "big blue widgets" and so on as title? or just add your company name, and nothing else.

description: if you can write a short description (longer than 50 chars, shorter than 150) for every single product, it's pretty hard to get all of descriptions too similar. if you are forced to generate description automatically, keeping it short will help avoiding duplicate content there.

keywords: don't use it at all :)

[proboscis]

just add your company name, and nothing else

I like that too:

Company Name - Blue Widgets
Largest selection of blue widgets at the lowest prices.

People like to click on that and I'm not so sure that repeating the keyword over and over helps, but sometimes I like to sneak in both the singular and the plural. This works for me, I vary my descriptions a little, but they're basically all the same just the topic/product name changes.