Home page Title - How important??

[gardendata]

Hi all - A newbie to this game. I normally just build web sites and they somehow get to to 3 or 4 for their given keywords. (My main 'attack' is the Title tag and the Description tag - never use the keyword tag!)
My main site - www.gardenseeker.com has around 600 pages of info, and each page is optimised as above - so vast majority of them get to top 3 or 4 positions in google msn etc. for their particular keywords.
The site returns 3-5 for 'gardening advice' search - sometimes 1 or 2. Recently, I messed up and somehow managed to get the url in my Title Tag.... Didn't spot it before googlbot did the rounds and panicked.. However, it only dropped one position for that particular keyword - even though showing as simply gardenseeker.com in the title instead of the usual 'Gardening advice, gardening information and garden help'on the google search!!! It just makes me wonder how important the title tag actually is - or is it because the rest of the site is so highly rated, that helped???

[adore]

Title is one of the most important factors. But having in mind there are over 120 factors, it's change doesn't necessarily influence on SERPs significantly.
In my opinion, in your case you had some big advantage over the next sites and that's why your drop was really small.