SEO Explained - Page 8
Technically implementing your new titles

The technical process of <title> updates

The physical process of updating your page title depends on the type of site you have.   If you have a site which is made up of a set of individual .html files ie homepage.html, products.html etc – then you simply need to FTP these files down onto your computer, and edit each file by hand using a text editor of your choice and manually update the text that appears between the opening <title> and the closing </title> tags in your HTML file.  

If you run a content management system, or have a complex set of structured ASP, JSP or PHP files, it may be easier if you just request some assistance from your web developer to update the page <title> tags ie you identify what you want for each page title, and give them the task of performing the update itself.  This is because these types of sites can implement methods of drawing titles from common "header" files.   Anyway, if this sounds confusing or obscure, then it's probably best to obtain some expert assistance.  It's not an overly time consuming practice, and so it shouldn't cost you much to get this help.

Duplication of <titles> - Be careful!

One of the most common SEO problems I see on client sites is a <title> tag that is the same for every page on a website.   By having a single title tag which is common across the website, you are telling Google and the other search engines that all your pages are the same.    Because Search Engine companies are fairly clever, they will often still index your site and allow you to be found, but having common titles across a site can have a seriously detrimental impact on your ranking – anything from just not ranking well (i.e. your site appears on page 500 of the results instead of page 1) all the way through to your website being relegated to the Google “Supplemental Index”.

Supplemental results are identifiable by the “Supplemental Result” which appears in green after your web address.

The supplemental index is a secondary index that Google uses to keep a record of old pages which may have moved (such as the examples from Salsa above) or these entries could be pages that have been deemed to be copies of other pages on your website, and therefore less relevant to searchers. 

The bottom line is that if your pages are listed as supplemental, then this will massively impact your search ranking in a negative way – so its very important to ensure your page <titles> are unique across your site.

To get your site out of the supplemental index, following the instructions in this eBook about unique titles, descriptions and keywords will help a great deal, but once your site is listed in the supplemental index it may take a few months to get out, so you'll need to be patient.   Also - sites which are brand new, will sometimes have pages listed as supplemental for a month or two, so again - you might need to be a little patient.   If you're site's pages are stuck in the supplemental despite doing all these things, then an SEO consulting company might need to be called upon to help you resolve this.

Page 9 : Optimising your META Description & Keywords