Excellent article from Jill Whalen on the importance of Title Tags:
http://www.seo-news.com/archives/2009/oct/8.html
This is something we do when optimizing for our clients as well – without access to title tags, it becomes very hard to optimize a website. When working on a client’s website though, I differ slightly from Jill’s method of putting the company name in the tags: though I agree that including the name is good SEO practice, I usually I place it at the end, rather than the beginning of the tag. So for example, a websites Title tags would look something like “Cat Food and Food For Cats – Umbrella Corporation Foods” after we optimized the site.
But that is a minor differentiation in technique.
We also find that we can usually fit up to three keywords per page – anything over that cap though and the Title tags (as well as other on-page elements) begin to look stuffed and unprofessional. This is not a hard rule however, as we have made exceptions in the past – but it is one we typically abide by for the most part.