Search Engines use the same methodology when crawling the pages of your website; the page title is located in the "head" section of your websites code and each page title should summarise the main content of that specific page. This is one of the most important factors in "on page" optimisation and one of the first things you should look at if you are keen to get your site ranked highly in search engines.

On too many occasions I see websites with a generic page title e.g. "Company Name" or even worse "Untitled Document"! Although having your company name in your page titles may be beneficial if you have brand awareness and people are looking for your brand name I would say this.... Do you have your company name in your domain name? Is your company name unique? Do you mention your company name on your website? ...If yes, then the chances are you will naturally rank for your company name without needing to use it in your page title. It would be far more beneficial to use the page title of each page to accurately summarise the content and topic of that specific page. By doing this you are defining the main keywords or key phrases for each page, in the page title.

Right, before you get excited and go off to stuff your page titles full of keywords a word of warning- Most search engines will truncate the content of a page title after 63 characters, so my advice would be use a maximum of 63 characters in the page title. If you make your page title excessively long, it may be seen as spam by Search Engines and have a negative effect on your websites visibility in major search engines. Also, I believe that a more compact page title has a greater ranking influence than one that is too long. In essence, the more words you have in your page title the more diluted your keywords or key phrases become. Some also believe that the words at the start of a page title hold more ranking influence than words deeper into the page title.

When you are optimising your page titles it is important to keep your website visitors in mind. Although it is very tempting to only use keywords (search queries) in your page titles to gain an increased ranking for these words, you have to remember that the page title is the link that is displayed in the SERP's (search engine ranking pages). If it is uninteresting or clearly written for search engines then the click through rate from the SERP's may be low.

In conclusion then: The title of a webpage should be unique to each specific page. Try and summarise the content of that page clearly, for human users, but include your main keywords. Keep each title under 65 characters and put your most relevant keywords at the start of the page title. When you have completed this task you will need to look at a number of other "on page" factors.