Have you ever noticed that when you look at your browser favorites menu or the address bar, some entries have their own little icon beside their URL?
It’s called a “Favicon” (a graphic file with a .ico extension) and it’s placed in the root directory of the web site. Everytime you bookmark a site that has its own favicon.ico file, it is added to your browser, and it will be visible from then on in the favorites menu and in the address bar. This is an example of how they look:
Favicons in Favorites menu
Yahoo Favicon in address bar
At the beginning, only large websites had a favicon, but now you too can create one and use it to brand your website. In fact, we have already done it:
The Internet Digest Favicon
The first thing you have to do is to create your favicon. To be displayed by browsers, it must have a size of 16×16 pixels. To create one, you can use a graphics program called Icon Forge (you can download a free trial version in CNET):
http://download.com.com/3000-2195-10128559.html
You can either create an icon from scratch, or import a 16×16 ‘.gif’ or ‘.jpg’ file and save it as a ‘.ico’ file.
You will then have to save your icon with the default name of ‘favicon.ico’, and upload it to the root directory of your website (where your index page is). Finally, after that, you must associate your icon to your web page. You do that by including the following HTML code immediately after the <HEAD> tag of your page:
<link REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” HREF=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/favicon.ico”>
Once you’ve done that, you’re done. To try it out, go to your web page and add it to your favorites. You should be able to see the favicon next to your bookmarked page title. Also, the next time you type your URL in the address bar, you will also see your favicon to the left of the URL.
P.S. Favicons work with Internet Explorer 5 or newer, and with recent versions of Netscape.
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Mario Sanchez publishes The Internet Digest ( http://www.theinternetdigest.net ), an internet marketing content site packed with useful articles and resources, and SEO Tutorial (http://www.seotutorial.info) where you can learn the basics of search engine optimization in four easy steps.
