question about meta tags title, description and keywords

want to hear your opinion

[crimsonblack]

If I created a site that was 1000 pages big

does it matter to the search engines if the description and the keywords were all the same for each of the pages? would they penalize me?

reason i ask is im finding it awfully time consuming typing up a description and thinking up keywords for every page... its literally taking hours and days just to do that

I need a faster way but... I want to be sure that my pages would be in good standing with google, yahoo and msn

lastly.. if I have the name of my site in the title for every page along with the name of the page does that effect things?

any ideas, thoughts or feedback is really appreciated

[tedster]

No penalization - shoot, you can rank #1 with no meta tags at all. But can they help? Sure can. If your on-page optimization is good, you can often copy/paste the first sentence (or some other key sentence) as a meta description.

The meta keywords tag is currently not a strong factor and so it's less important if you can't automatically or programatically generate it. Really, you just need to choose 3-4 words that are quite specific to the page and move on. You can pretty much assume the more global keywords are handled by anchor text, both on-site and in IBLs. But gone are the days of agonizing over a meta keywords tag - just put a few quick and obvious words in there and move on.

[tedster]

if I have the name of my site in the title for every page along with the name of the page does that effect things?

Sure - it's often quite a wasteful thing to do, because it dilutes the power of unique keywords for each page. Some businesses feel it helps their branding, but I haven't seen that actual work out in practice.

Focused titles means better search engine rank, means more traffic, means getting more sales. Let your content and/or service do the branding - make the page titles really good titles. There's probably no on-page factor that has as much power.

[us60]

The title of your page, located in the <title>...</title> tags in the head, appear in the title bar of the visitor's browser window, and also appears as the link title text in your search results listing.

I found the order of the words makes a difference. For example, a search I recently made for;
css title property
brought the w3Schools tutorial to the top of the list, whereas:
display property css
placed that site lower and another tutorial page was closer to the top. This second search probably brings in the topic of real estate too.

Key words do make a difference. I subscribe to a list of the currently popular keywords, and found that the word "amateur" was very rarely used, whereas the word "ham" was used a lot more as it applies to amateur radio.

My site for amateur radio began popping up for ham searches.

With a site of 1000 pages, even 100 pages, you may be building for a club, association or other organization or community. Would be an idea to split that task between different people and have each topic's pages be overseen by someone in charge of that topic to keep the page information fresh and current. I ran into that problem on my club site. Too much for me to keep track of it all.

Larry