Thanks Tom, yes that's very helpful

I want to optimise the logo on our site. Our developers have presently got the site logo code like this:

601 character description, no keywords

1. How best to use the alt text and description?

2. Do I concentrate on alt text?

Isn't the 601 character description:
a) too long, and
b) an opportunity to add relevant keywords again, like the alt text?

Thanks for your response BlueCorona!

The pages concerned are for products and the 'wraparound' text regards free delivery and next day delivery - this is relevant to all the pages and also helpful to tempt the user to click as it's pretty much the best deal in the country. Would you still say that is detrimental?

Individual meta descriptions over time... we have 25,000 products and add / remove many products on a daily basis so I don't think it's really a realistic option.

Thanks Marisa - my changes are certainly customer-based (definite statements about free delivery and next day delivery)

Thanks Marisa, pretty much as I was thinking (hoping!)

If there is one different word in each description, that is presumably enough to stop them being seen as duplicates?

Also, I was intrigued that you said "Google doesn't officially use meta descriptions" - is there some doubt over this? I thought they'd confirmed it themselves?

I think the choice I have to make is, is it better to have 100% unique descriptions that are too short (keyword only, as at present), or much less unique ones that are 130+ characters. I guess the latter wins.

I'm working on a large website (circa 25k pages) that presently just replicates each page title as a meta description. I'm thinking of doing a 'find and replace' in the database so I change:

to

where the preceeding and following text would be the same in each case eg

Is this unique enough? Obviously the individual keyword would make it technically unique each time....and manually changing them would take the rest of my life