Count the number of occurrences of a string using sed?

I have a file which contains "title" written in it many times. How can I find the number of times "title" is written in that file using the sed command provided that "title" is the first string in a line? e.g.

# title
title
title

should output the count = 2 because in first line title is not the first string.

Update

I used awk to find the total number of occurrences as:

awk '$1 ~ /title/ {++c} END {print c}' FS=: myFile.txt

But how can I tell awk to count only those lines having title the first string as explained in example above?