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Great, thanks everybody.

Gotcha. With a "normal" WordPress install it should be pretty easy to make a change to the tags. You just go into the editor and find the right .php file(s). Are you by chance running Thesis or Genesis? I know it can be trickier with those platforms. If not, it sounds like an issue with how this specific theme or customization was done. Because normally it should be pretty straightforward.

Greetings Pamela! This is nothing to worry about at all.  UTF-8 is simply a type of character encoding and is set in the websites to instruct web browsers on how to interpret the character encoding.  See- http://screencast.com/t/s4I2RNsgqUh As it's not negative and perfectly normal, there's no need to change it at all.

Thank you everybody. I will give whitespark a shot.

It would depend on the brand name a bit, and if there are common modifiers that tend to go with it. Just do the usual thing and check using Google instant to see any suggestions that come up, plus check search volumes with the keyword tool. If there's searches for "Buy <brand name="">" then yes it will be worth using "buy" and "item" as a prefix and suffix.</brand>