Brand Your Site With A Favicon

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Sunday, 4 of November , 2007 at 4:16 pm

Do you know what a favicon is? If not, you should learn.

A favicon is one sure way to ensure that your website stands out in a crowd. It’s a branding item that appears in your site visitors’ browser window next to your URL. By uploading a favicon to your web server to be used on all of your web pages, you not only make your website more brandable, but you also increase your credibility and memorable.

Does the favicon have any SEO benefits? Not that I’ve seen, but you can convert your favicon (an .ico) file into a .jpg, increase its size, and use it as an image on your website. What many companies do is take their company logo and turn it into an .ico file to use as their favicon. Either way is OK, but you get better mileage out of your images that way.

You should name your favicon with the image name of favicon.ico. That’s the universal recognition of the file and search browsers will automatically show it to your site visitors in the proper location.

Creating a favicon is easy. Just go to http://www.favicon.cc/, a favicon generator, and you can have your very own favicon within five minutes. After creating your favicon, just upload it to the root directory of your website and add the following code to your header:

link REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” HREF=”http://www.yourwebsite.com/favicon.ico”/

Don’t forget to surround the syntax with brackets that look like < and >. Now you’re all set with your favicon.

Category: Branding

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