Using colons in the Title Tag

Wow! My apologies that my previous explanation was not quite up to your standards.

No, it makes no difference as far as SEO. Like I said, search engines ignore punctuation. Allow me to add "they ignore most punctuation and special characters in title tags"

So, you could use

Microsoft Office Templates -- HTML Templates
or
Microsoft Office Templates ^ HTML Templates
or
Microsoft Office Templates | HTML Templates

There are a few punctuation marks that Google does look at...

Dollar signs $
Underscore _

So, don't use those.

But, no there is generally no distinction between separating with | :: or -

If anything, there may be people that say Google thinks that a hyphen (-) implies a close relationship between two words. But, that is mainly when people are performing search queries, and it doesn't seem to be a big deal in title tags.

There may be others still that say you should avoid excess special characters, like using (:. But, I don't believe that Google has ever said that excessive special characters specifically affects your rankings. But, it might be annoying to your website visitors.

So, once again, we can say that you could use any of your three choices. However, the industry standard tends to be a vertical line (or a 'pipe'). Of course, there are number webmasters that choose the hyphen (-) or the colon (:. You may even want to choose the double hyphen (--) or the dancing kirby (>'o'>)

Hope I came to the point for you Mister 3 posts who was asking for help. Lucky I was here to give it to you.

-Noah