The <meta type="title">
tag has little rank or relevance to search engine crawlers. The good old <title>
tag is far and away the most important element of a good web page.
As for the format of the title, I think there is good advice in this article at Standards Schmandards:
If the title contains the name of the
site, the name of the site should be
placed at the end of the title. This
makes sure that multiple bookmarks
from the same site are easy to browse
through in the bookmarks folder and
listeners to your page get the most
important information first.
I would highly suggest that you do include the company name or site name at the end of each title because:
- Consistency is always a good idea.
- Newer browsers like Firefox 3 allow you to search your history and bookmarks by page titles, so users can easily get a view of all the pages they've visited on your site by simply typing in your company name or site name.
- People that use screen readers will have no idea what website they are visiting if it isn't listed somewhere on the page.
However, I would not put a description of the site anywhere but on the home page because that would make the title unnecessarily long and would frustrate screen reader users because they would have to make an extra effort to skip that information on every page they visit.
If you do decide to put the company name in your title, keep these things in mind (also from Standards Schmandards):
- The separator character should be
distinct so that users understand
that it is a separator. (I.e. it
should not appear as part of text
items in the title).
- Prime candidates to use as separators are the vertical bar (|),
the dot (·) and the dash (-).
- Regardless of the character you pick, it is important to surround it
with whitespace. This will aid both
sighted visitors and listeners as it
will distinguish the character from
the title text.
Based on all the information herein, that essentially makes the second example in your question the obvious choice:
<title>
Page Description - Company Name
</title>