Help:Pagetitle

MediaWiki:Pagetitle contains the text that is shown in the title bar of your internet browser and on search results.

Your page rank is partly based on what's in the title bar at the top of the page. So if you want your wiki to show up when people search for "charles dickens", then "Charles Dickens Wiki" is a better title than "Scroogepedia".

Search for your topic's name on Google, and you'll see that the top ten results almost always have that phrase in the page title. That's where you want to be.

What to say
Resist the urge to give your wiki a clever name, or a cute URL. "Ugly Betty Wiki" is always going to rank higher than "Modepedia".

You should also make sure it describes the site well - i.e. rather than just "Wookieepedia", which means little to many people, it helps to say "Wookieepedia, the Star Wars wiki".

How to say it
Starting in MediaWiki 1.14, the page title is controlled by 2 MediaWiki pages not just one:
 * 1) MediaWiki:Pagetitle-view-mainpage is only for the mainpage, and
 * 2) MediaWiki:Pagetitle is for non-mainpage.

By default, the code for MediaWiki:Pagetitle is " ", and the default for MediaWiki:Pagetitle-view-mainpage is " ".

The effect of this is that the main page of the wiki does not show the page name in the title. This is advisable because "Main Page" means very little to search results, and just gets in the way of the actual site title. All other pages on the wiki are unaffected.

It is advisable that you customize this feature, to add some additional text after the sitename, to give more descriptive and memorable text to the browser window and bookmark links.