A Cre8asite Forums thread is picking at Rand's post this week on Best Practices for Title Tags. First go read his post and then come back here to read the forum commentary on it.
Cre8asite Forums Admin, Bill Slawski, also well known for his outstanding SEO By The Sea blog, goes through some of his points.
The first is about branding your titles with your brand name. I.e. Company Name - Keywords Here. As you can see here, I do not include the name of the blog in the titles for the individual pages. I personally agree that branding is not that important when it comes to SEO titles. Bill says, "branding is something that you could take advantage of in title elements, but it's probably not the place to attempt to build a brand - there are better ways to do that." He explains that putting company name on the contact us page, about us page, etc are smart ideas. I would also put the brand up and front on the home page page title. But there are two schools of thought on this and go with which you prefer.
Bill then looks at the tip to repeat the title phrase in your header tag. I agree that there is nothing wrong with this, but if you want to change it up slightly, that is also fine.
Finally, he added to the list, putting the title of the page in your breadcrumb trail (the links at the top of the page that tell you where you have clicked). Often, it is not able to fit it all in there, so matching the title tag to the breadcrumb trail is often not feasible.
Forum discussion at Cre8asite Forums.
