so in <title> tags, does it matter what words come first? like lets say i have a web site called, "dog lovers", and the page being visited is about "poodles" would the title "dog lovers - poodles" be less effective than "poodles - dog lovers" if someone was searching for "poodles"?
Nowadays Google doesn`t focus much on such things. Order of words does somewhat matter only within phrase: "one number" and "number one" aren`t exactly the same phrase.
This would be more effective with Yahoo than Google. Keyword would be better closer to the beginning but it is more important to make the title attractive to clicks as it is sometimes used as the title in the search results.
poodles word in starting of title will be more effective. But there are not such a big effect that you can differentiate benefits but if you do not need to spend a lot of time for such changes than do it. And is is also visitor friendly if you place your targeted products or service key phrase in starting of the title for that particular page.
Every one want to make attractive title, you should be start from u r sites URL 1st then u r main keyword and arrange both of properly, For Eg:- "dog lovers website provides poodles"