My SEO guy just asked me how to set the title tag on the home page of a site created with Joomla!.  Without thinking about it, I responded that the title is set using the title of the article.  He pointed out that it didn’t seem to be working on the home page, so I checked.  Pages that show multiple articles, or a list of articles, get their title from the name of the category of section whose articles they’re showing.

The home page is treated differently, showing on the name of the site by default.  Google turned up a couple of options.  The first is detailed on Hobo SEO Company’s blog, and involves installing the sh404sef Joomla! extension.  That’s a popular extension for tweaking a site’s SEO features, but adding a new extension usually requires some testing and caution, and we were looking for a quick solution.

The second solution was provided by Joomla! forum member Ghonjez in the first response in this thread:

Go to Menu – Main menu – Home
Look at Parameters (System) in right panel, and then change ‘Page Title’.

You can use this trick to set the title for any page that displays multiple articles, a list of articles, etc.