Although this is for SEO newbs, it never hurts to remind even the most experienced SEO to check the basics now and then. Go to google.com and type this in:
site:www.yourdomain.com (or site:yourdomain.com if you don't use www)
Look at the results for your site: search. Is the same title repeated over and over again? Is the same description repeated over and over again? Especially in the case of the titles, you are losing out on the most effective on-page SEO tip there is. If your page is about chocolate cake, but your document title is MySite.com (because it is just using the default across all pages), you've just lost out on the biggest impact you could have made to rank that page for [chocolate cake]. Fix these problems ASAP to potentially get some immediate rankings improvements.
(Note: If you signed your site up with Google's Webmaster Tools, you can get this same information presented in a more readable format, in the Diagnostics/Content Analysis section. This tool gives you information on meta description issues (long, short, and duplicate descriptions) as well as title issues (duplicate, missing, long, short, and non-informative titles).
I bring this up because I'm often surprised to see this issue come up again and again with folks who aren't SEO experts. I sometimes forget that the basics aren't common knowledge. Interestingly, however, is that sometimes the SEO experts get so involved in other things that they sometimes forget to handle the basics. Actually, I think more often than not, they don't really forget, but they don't realize that something has changed, and the basic optimization they once covered, has gone away. Occasionally checking the basics is always a good idea.