The TITLE element of your web page (found within the HEAD) is very important, probably the most important part of a page (especially for placement in Google and Yahoo) and should ideally be optimized for a small number of keywords or phrases (preferably just the one main phrase for that page). The exact number of keywords and their placement is dependent on a number of SEO factors including the difficulty of the phrases, the PageRank (PR) of the page and if you have control of the links and anchor text to that page (so you can change the anchor text of the links).
As a general rule of thumb less is better than more as it concentrates the SEO benefit over less keywords.
Example - This web page SEO Services is optimized primarily for the phrase SEO Services and a few related SEO terms including SEO Quote, SEO Expert, SEO Consultant and various phrases including the keyword SEO.
We could of stuffed the TITLE element with all of these keyword phrases.We decided to use the short title because this concentrates any benefit from the title to that single two word phrase. Since Search Engines like Google rate the contents of the title as important you ideally want THE most important phrase for that page on its own.
There are exceptions to this loose rule, if you have a very small site and lots of keyword phrases you wish to target, you have little choice, but to double or even triple up.
Also if you have high PR pages (i.e. PR6) and are having no problems keeping the main phrase for those pages, you could experiment by adding further highly relevant search phrases. Take care not to over do it, what you do today may not show full effect for several months. For example if you added an extra phrase and 4 weeks later your main SERPs had not dropped, so you add another phrase, you might not see the negative effects of the first change for a couple more months. You may find 3 or 4 months after the first change loosing the pages main previously stable SERP!
When making changes to a successful page err on the side of caution, SEO is a very long term process and requires a lot of patience. If you are taking a risk (like adding more phrases to a title) give the page at least 2 months and preferably 3 before deciding if it was successful or not. If a recent change results in a major drop seriously consider reverting to the original page, but be aware what you see today might be the result of what you did 3 months ago or could be a coincidence, the search engine may of changed it’s algorithm (check the forums for reports of big changes) or some links to your site have been removed or changed.
Regards
Rohit Mehra
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