In this issue you will:

1. Learn the Answer to the Great Favicon.ico Mystery
   
   
2. Learn How to Turn that Information into a Killer Tactic

Those of us that analyze our server logs began to notice a strange phenomenon in early 1999. It happened to me the same way it happened to everyone else.

A bizarre entry started showing up in our log files:

/favicon.ico 404 file not found

What was this? I had never heard of this file before. Why were people looking for it on my sites and why so many?

And this wasn't just one site. It was *all* of my sites.

I quickly dismissed any wild notions of some bizarre conspiracy to confuse me and began to investigate. After doing a bit of research and calling a few of my secret contacts, I finally discovered what it meant and it was quite cool.

Internet Explorer 5.0 has an awesome new feature that really benefits aggressive webmasters. It allows you to include an icon with your site listing that is displayed when someone bookmarks your site.

So, instead of that little page with the Internet Explorer logo, your site will display your icon.

That is powerful! One of the problems with bookmarks is that it seems people don't go back to them. If your site stands out from the list with a distinctive icon, do you think it will affect the number of times it gets clicked?

You bet!

So, this is where the favicon.ico mystery comes from. Those little entries you see in your log file come from IE 5.0 surfers bookmarking your page.

So, how do you fix it?

It's really easy. It will just take a little bit of your time.

Here are some hard and fast rules for getting this to work on your site:

1. IE 5.0 expects the favicon.ico file to reside in the directory of the page being bookmarked. Put one in *every* directory on your site.

Here's an example of the one we use at the Killer Tactics site:

http://www.killertactics.com/favicon.ico

2. The favicon.ico file *must* be in the following format according to Microsoft. Now, I've seen other formats work, but it might be best not to tempt fate:

16 colors in the palette

16x16 pixels in size

Now, that doesn't give you a lot of freedom, but I'm not complaining. It's a great feature.

3. Icons generally have to be created using an icon editor. Your standard image editor probably won't support it. You can find one quite easily at any good software site.

That's it. For those of you out there that are really motivated, this is a great tool to help you stand out from the crowd.

And remember, when you're ready for more heavy-hitting tools for developing, marketing, promoting, and designing your site check out 1,001 Killer Internet Marketing Tactics.