The advice contained within this article will be applicable and will work well with one type of site, but could be the wrong approach for another kind of site.

Its up to the owner of the site, and just gives a different perspective on trying to stand out from the pages of links contained within the SERPS.

1) Remove brand – if you can build up an online brand you have to start from somewhere and getting remembered because someone notices your brand appear for 4 or 5 searches is certainly a good thing.

2) Page title tags – I’d be concerned with Google mainly here, optimising for a maximum of 64 characters, unless the majority of your search traffic is referred from a search engine with a lower cut-off point.

3) The order of keywords is important and if the tag doesn’t make sense without the duplicate I’d leave it in there. A plural variation could be an option but I’d focus on the actual keyphrases which are important rather than individual keywords.

4) Special characters, looks very spammy in my opinion. It might draw your eye to it but probably not for a good reason and it would actually put me off clicking. I’d use characters such as “|” “-” “>” to separate keywords or the brand name but that’s it.

5) This seems to be getting too confused with PPC ads where your looking to entice conversions rather than clicks. I wouldn’t recommend this, the main purpose of a title tag is to describe the theme of the page to users and the search engines. I’d use the description tag if I wanted to add a call-to-action but “Product Name Longtail keyword | Brand” in my opinion would be far more effective to rankings as well as clickthrough rates than “Buy Product Online Today From £…”

Load the gun and remove those bullet points, please! There are a couple of elements of truth, but very misleading…

Yeah you are right, in that it is valuable real estate, In my opinion i think you should only use the symbols to gain attention if you genuinely have the space left over after using your primary keywords etc. In terms of it affecting your SEO, the search engines know to ignore symbols in meta tags, so you wouldn’t benefit from using such a tactic SEO wise, but in terms of gaining attention from the public, its probable you would stand out over your competitors.

Page titles are one of the most important elements of site optimization. When a crawler examines your site, the first elements it looks at are the page titles….