There is actually significant disagreement in the SEO world to whether branding should be first in the page title. That might be the name of your site or company.
Digging deeper though, the debate revolves around whether to have it appended or preprended to the page title.
The discussion got opened up again, but recently the problem was addressed and solved by the rich Joomlasphere of 3rd party developers.
There are now two simple plugins available for 1.5 that allow you to manipulate the page title:
Both seem to work pretty well. With the new and improved default SEF in Joomla 1.5, you could well get by with just one of these simple plugin’s rather than a larger SEF extension.
Are you looking forward to easier SEO and SEF with 1.5?