It dawned on me recently how easy it was for me to locate web sites that I had bookmarked and appeared in My Favorites menu with a little icon displayed next to the web site name, so I decided to find out if I could put one on my own web site to make it stand out in the My Favorites menu and easier for whoever bookmarked my site to locate.
I started my search on Google and discovered that the little icon that replaces the IE logo (in IE) is called a Favicon (pronounced fav-eye-con) and is short for Favorites Icon or it is sometimes called a bookmark icon. The Favicon also shows in the address bar as well. Notice the red Y! symbol that appears in the left-most area of the address bar in Internet Explorer when you open Yahoo!, or the butterfly in MSN . What a great way to personalise your site.
You will require IE 5.0 or higher and a favicon.ico can show up in at least three different places in Windows:
1) In the Favorites list selectable on the Start menu;
2) In the location bar of the browser when you are visiting the web site;
3) On your desktop if you first bookmark the site, click Start, Favorites, hold down the control key and click on the bookmark to drag it to the desktop (it copies the icon as a shortcut).
The favicon.ico can also show up in the following two places:
4) On the taskbar if you bookmark the site, hold down the control key, then right click on the bookmark and drag it to the task bar, it copies the icon there;
5) On the links bar if you bookmark the site, hold down the control key, then right click on the bookmark and drag it to the Links tool bar, it copies the icon there.
If you search in the engines for favicon you will find that many sites come up offering favicon tutorials, online tools to create favicon icons, free favicon icons and installation instructions too.
A favicon should be 16 X 16 pixels with 16 colors and the file name must be favicon.ico and ideally you should search for a program that allows you to create favicons online. Remember, if you do not save it as favicon.ico it will not work. Do not make the mistake of just shrinking an image to icon size and renaming it with a .ico file extension. That will not work either because it is not a real icon file. Do not be surprised if your own favicon does not show up in your own browser when you open your site, as sometimes this can take up to a few days and even disappear again only to reappear.
I had fun creating my own personal 16 x 16 pixel image in MyImager and then found a site on Google that created a favicon.ico file and I uploaded my image and clicked on generate favicon and that is how easy it was. I then uploaded the favicon.ico file to the root web directory, in the same location as the index.html page of my hosted website and bingo, I now have a Favicon and have personalized and distinguished my web site from others. Creating such an icon adds to the professionalism of your site, marking you as a web designer who attends to detail.
So now when someone bookmarks my site with a browser that supports favicons, my favicon will appear, as opposed to a default image (a logo for Internet Explorer), which is used instead if no favicon.ico had been provided. I am sure if you look through your own Favorites Menu you will notice that the bulk of the images are the IE logo.
The favicon allows the webmaster to further promote their site, and to create a more customized appearance within a visitor\\\'s browser. Often, the favicon reflects the look and feel of the web site or the organization\\\'s logo. Have fun creating your Favicon.
Fact: This is not enough by itself; there have to be keywords within the page itself (i.e. in the copy). If you merely have keywords in your Meta tags, search engines may consider it to be spam and ignore your site, hurting your rankings!
Superstition: You can get your page ranked higher with hidden links or text in a page .
Fact: This is known as keyword stuffing, and can get your page banned or otherwise penalized if this is discovered. At one time, this was considered a great way to boost your search engine ranking, but it is now considered to be spamming by many search engines. For help www.the20seotools.com. Superstition: The more reciprocal links you have with other sites, the better your own search engine ranking will be. Fact: Not necessarily so. If you are linked with some pages, such as FFA pages and link farms, his can make your ranking lower, not higher. What you should try to have is inbound links from sites which have quality content relevant to your site. While no one is exactly sure how Google calculates this, relevant links seem to be given far more weight.
Superstition: Most sites are optimized. What chance do I have to succeed?
Fact: Studies show that up to 60% of all websites are not properly optimized to rank high in search engines. The nature of search engines makes it difficult for web designers to properly optimize web pages for their clients. Always discuss optimization with your web designer to determine what services are included in the project.
Superstition: The more times you repeat a keyword in a page, the higher your page will rank.
Fact: All the search engines use different algorithms for ranking. They all claim keyword density is important, but they don't say what the proper density is. If your keyword density is too high or too low you will be penalized. Some so-called experts say the keyword density should be 3%, some say as high as 6%. No one really knows.
Superstition: Once your site in indexed by the search engines changes to it will have little effect.
Fact: The exact opposite is true. You should constantly be updating your website. Simple things like fixing broken links can enhance your positions in the search results. Search engines won't continue to spider your site if they run into a number of broken links. Content is king. Constantly improving your content helps the search engines when spidering your website. The easier you make it for the search engines with solid content the better your link positioning will be. By removing outdated material with routine maintenance and updating your pages regularly, you are letting the search bots and crawlers know to come back and re-crawl your site regularly for changes.
Superstition: Robots.txt file and sitemaps aren't needed.
Fact: Search engine bots look for the robots.txt and your sitemap as soon as they get to your site. These files tell the bots what to look at on your site and any link in your sitemap will be crawled. You should definitely have both of these files; they should be placed into the root directory of your domain these files can be a big help in getting a better page ranking.
Superstition: Search engines cannot index pages with Flash; using Flash on your page will lead to search engines penalizing your site.
Fact: While search engines do not index the Flash movie itself, they will index the text of the movie (you need to specify Flash text in your HTML) along with the rest of your page. Flash has no effect on the site itself in terms of indexing and does not keep your site from being crawled either. What search engines don't like is websites which automatically re-direct, including Flash pages which do this. It's the redirection, not the Flash which is the problem here.
Binny has sinced written about articles on various topics from SEO Search Engine Optimization. . Binny's top article generates over 1300 views. to your Favourites.