Templates for Meta Description, Good or Bad?

[TheSEOGuy1]

Hello, We have a website where users can browse photos of different categories. For each photo we are using a meta description template such as:

Are you looking for a nice and cool photo? [Photo name] is the photo which might be of interest to you.

And in the keywords tags we are using:

[Photo name] photos, [Photo name] free photos, [Photo name] best photos.

I'm wondering, is this any safe method? it's very difficult to write a manual description when you have 3,000+ photos in the database.

Thanks!

[danatanseo]

I think this is an excellent question. It's something that was in place where I am the in-house SEO when I came on board. After two years of kicking and screaming, I finally got buy off on doing away with the template. Here's why I didn't like it:

1. It caused a lot of duplicate content problems. We have products that might be alike in every way with the exception of a microphone frequency band. Often, this information wasn't included in the product name/title, and consequently, when it was used to populate the meta description "template" we ended up with tons of duplicates.
2. Problems with length. We had templated copy that worked just find for about 75% of our brands and products, but some of our brand names and products names were much longer, resulting in the templated descriptions being too long and getting truncated, totally defeating their own purpose.
3. Poor user experience. Many of our competitors use templated meta descriptions, specifically Sweetwater, Musician's Friend and Guitar Center. Nearly all of their descriptions are 100% identical with the exception of products swapped in and out. From a searcher's standpoint, this kind of sucks because it doesn't tell me anything interesting about the product.
4. Lost marketing opportunity - Are you really going to use the same marketing message for every single product on your site? That's a huge opportunity lost I think.

Okay, maybe if we were a huge brand like Sweetwater, it just wouldn't matter and we could get away with this because brand recognition would be strong enough to outweigh the fact that there was nothing of unique interest in the description...But, we aren't Sweetwater, so making every marketing opportunity count to us is crucial. We have about 3,000 SKUs, and a tiny marketing department. Somehow we're managing to crank out those unique descriptions just fine. 3,000 really isn't that many. If it does get to be too much, scaling this with freelancers would be extremely easy and cheap to do provided you lay down clear parameters for exactly what you want.

My advice? Take the time to add unique descriptions...oh, and forget about populating the meta keywords. You don't need to do that any more.

Hope that's helpful!

Dana

[AlanBleiweiss]

I really like Dana's response - it covers the primary consideration - how much time would it REALLY take to write unique Meta descriptions? If the TRUE answer is "unrealistically too much time", then a template COULD work. The trick though is addressing the issues Dana talks about.

If you only use a primary product name as the variable, you run risks. If you have a 2nd database field you have that includes some differentiation between otherwise identical products, that can help.  As long as you understand total length as a consideration.