In this day and age, every single business big or small should have a website. Now that you have picked your designer, ensure that you have these two things on it.
Firstly, you need favicon.
Favicons are the little piece of graphic that represents your brand on browser tabs, bookmark lists, search history, search ads and even search results. We have already discussed in a previous post the use of favicons and their role in branding and usability. Today we will dig deeper into this much inconspicuous but rather significant piece of branding element. We will talk about whether or not favicons have a role to play in SEO, what are the requirements in terms of mobile devices and the various tools used to help you create a favicon.
What is a Favicon?
For all those who are unaware of the what a favicon is: Favicons are 16×16 pixels small icons that usually contain the logo, the first letter of the brand or a generic image that represents the business type. These files are placed in a file called favicon.ico and placed in the root directory of a website.
It was Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 5 released in March 1999 that first supported this file. It was denoted as ‘shortcut icon’ in the rel element of the code that was placed in the section a site. In December 1999, the favicon was standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) with the recommendation of Hypertext Markup Language (HTML).
It was intended to be shown only for bookmarked URLs. However, these days there are many instances where favicons are displayed. They are extremely helpful for branding and usability in various ways. Google has incorporated favicons directly into search results, showing a page’s favicon next to the page’s breadcrumb in its search snippet. Google only shows the favicon in mobile search results.
Secondly, featured image. Featured images are like the cover of a book and as the adage goes, never judge a book by its cover, the truth is that it’s hard not to. Making the best first impression becomes infinitely easier with the use of an image. A picture speaks a thousand words – a thousand words that you won’t have to captivate your readers in a single glance.
Unlike the images you add to your posts and pages, images will travel much further. From social media site shares to recent post suggestion boxes, your featured images will be published in all kinds of places for potential subscribers to stumble upon.
One of the standout features relating to the use of images is that it brings structure and consistency to your blog. Suppose you’re writing a post that doesn’t have a ton of images to go with it. You can count on the featured image you use to ensure it doesn’t get lost in your site’s archives without a single view.
Featured images have become a norm for modern bloggers and reading a blog post without an image seems a bit off. In the following section, we’ll dive right into the best practices professionals use when it comes to selecting, customizing, and adding images.
So let’s ensure you have these two for your websites.