Why do you think it would help with SEO? A page title belongs into the page's title (hence the name) and there it's most effective for SEO.
bye, Dirk
Actually I had a case where I needed the page title in another template which is a similar problem.
For Geeklog 2.0.0 it wouldn't be a real problem if you was using a 2.0.0 theme since the page is generated by one function now (COM_createHTMLDocument).
For Geeklog 1.8.X you could create a really ugly hack. In COM_SiteHeader when the page title is created you can pass it to a global variable.
Then in COM_SiteFooter you can then write your global variable that contains the page title to the template variable.