Rand at SEOMoz has a Best Practices for Title Tags that goes over many of the simply fundamentals of a good title tag for both your users and search engines. Rand suggests that adding your brand name to the title tag is not a bad thing, but make sure it is just a piece of the title tag, users and search engines like to see relevant title information, based on the content of the page the link is pointing towards. Rand also suggests ensuring your title is 65 characters or less, make sure you have keywords in the title, be more specific when it makes sense, use dividers in the title, and more tips. While everyone may not agree 100% with Rand’s best practices here, they are all fairly solid tips, but it is important to apply these tips to your site – and not all may apply.
Related Topics: SEO: Titles & Descriptions
One other tip that I’ve found helpful for title tags is, after considering the basic subject of my page’s content, to transpose my phrase to include words that a searcher might use to search for that kind of content. For example, if my page is about how database driven websites are better than static pages my subject might be “database driven websites.