Web Page Titles, Keywords and Descriptions

I had a potential new client contact me today to talk about some changes for their website. They had their site designed and created by a large and trusted web developer. Their website was a very nice looking with clean graphics and easy to use menu, that is what the average web user would see. I browsed through several pages and noticed something odd. The titles were all the same on all the pages I visited. I little surprised by this I took a look at the html code for four of five pages and sure enough the titles were identical for all the pages. Not only were the titles the same all the pages were missing the meta tags for description and keywords. I was a little surprised, this client had paid a rather large sum of money for a website from a large web developer that has done hundreds if not thousands of websites and they made the titles all the same and left out the meta descriptions and keywords.

Why is this important? Well the title tag not only tells the visitor what the title of the page is, but it is also used by search engines in the indexing of the page. The meta descriptions and keywords tags, while many agree are not that important anymore, are also used by the search engines to help index the page and hopefully rank it for certain keywords. So if the site was about persian cats one of the main keywords would probably be “persian cats” and hopefully the site would show up when there is a search for that keyword. I checked this sites indexing with Google and sure enough of the 25 pages indexed, 24 were in the supplemental index. While some would say it is not a big deal to be in the supplemental results, I still suspect that it is better to not be there and one of the easiest ways of trying to get out of “supplemental hell” is to make sure that each page has a unique title and meta tag descriptions.

What has been your experiences with “supplemental hell” and have unique title and meta descriptions and keywords helped to bring you out of the supplemental index?