Using templates with duplicate meta data

[Cornbread]

Hello all, this is my first post here. I love this forum, have been lurking and learning for quite some time, but have a few questions. I am an inexperienced web master....web rookie would be a better description than master, but any way, when I create a new page on my web site, I use a dynamic web template (Master page) and just duplicate the same page, this saves a lot of work when adding new pages, but I am only able to change the title of each page, so my meta description is all the same for all my pages. So should I just leave the meta description blank on my template and let the search engine discover it's own description?

[peter_d]

Welcome to the forum

It's a good idea to make the description unique if you can. It will help your listing stand out, and there is evidence to suggest Google de-emphasizes pages that use identical meta-data.

Is there another authoring tool you can use? Are you familiar with FTP?

[Cornbread]

Thanks for the warm welcome. I am using MS Expression Web, which I really like but am stuck with this problem. What if I leave the meta description blank in the master template, then describe the page in an H2 tag. Wouldn't the Google Bot then just use the H2 tag info for the snippet? I have never heard of FTP.

[peter_d]

There's been some speculation of late that multiple pages with the same description tag are treated differently.
http://www.seobook.com/archives/002030.shtml
http://tropicalseo.com/2007/the-resu...tags-are-back/

However, the meta description tag isn't that important in the grand scheme of things, so I wouldn't worry too much either way. The Googlebot will use a snippet, although it's difficult to control which section of text it will grab from a page.

I'm not familiar with MS Expression Web, so perhaps others could help you there.

[Cornbread]

I am going to continue to use the template, for now, so I have three choices:

1. Use a long, detailed meta description to try and cover all bases.

2. Use a short generic meta description.

3. Don't use any meta description.

* what would you guys/gals recommend?