How important are unique titles and descriptions?

[neilpagecruise]

Hi there,

I've recently started working on a very large travel website. One of my main duties is to get it rankings for certain terms (which it is't at the moment, at all!)

A large proportion of the website is dynamic, meaning that the pages, and URLs are produced using sessions. I've already enquired with the company who provide the website about how I can get unique meta data for each page on our website. They came back and said it can be done for the static pages, but not for the dynamic pages. This leaves me with about thousands of pages with duplicated meta data. Not at all ideal.

I was just wondering how damaging this is likely to be to the SEO of my site. Am I going to be able to achieve rankings even with this issue? Or do I need to get it sorted ASAP?

Thanks

[neilpagecruise]

Wow! Thanks for all the replies!

Funny you should mention that Stephan, thats the exact same solution I put to our providers. Their working on a slightly different solution at the moment, but thats my fallback option.

My main issue is that there would be so many duplicate URLs (tens of thousands!), which the Search Engines would undoubtedly frown upon.

I'll keep you all updated on my progress!

Thanks again

[STPseo]

It is very important. We also have dynamic pages... a ton of them. However we found a solution by bringing other data already on the page into the description and title. Let's say that each page offers a different vacation package. You should see if the name of the package can be imported into the title and description. Since the data is already there... it can be done.

Come up with some strategy that works with the data you have. For example... with our product pages, we did something like: [product title] - save 35 - 70% at Sierra Trading Post.

[Paessler]

I agree with Andre, you should definitely go for unique titles and descriptions. Think about your users too: they will see the title tag and possibly the meta description on the SERPS, and it greatly influences a user's decision whether or not to click your search result. You might still achieve rankings without them, but you will not be able to use the full potential of the site.

[AndreVanKets]

We have just launched a new Travel website aswell. (4 months in the making)

Each page has its own targeted keywords so Meta Descriptions and Title tags for your destination pages are important!!

We found a plugin that allows us to change the "template" for the destination pages.

Tell those guys who built your site that not being able to edit dynamic pages is NOT cool and they need to make a plan!

If you dont put them in, google may decide to rank your home page for keywords instead of the correct tour/product page.

GREG