Small Business Websites

A favicon is short for ‘favorites icon.’ It is a small image displayed to the left of the web address when someone visits your site. For example, in the images below, you can see that Fluid Elements Web Design has a favicon of a leaf and Google has it’s famous G.

Favicons are an excellent way to help brand your business. Whenever someone bookmarks your site to their list of favorites, it will stand out, apart from the others. This makes it easy to find, identify and creates a branding in the mind of your customers, thus encouraging repeat visits to your website. Repeat visits mean more sales and that is your ultimate goal.

A favicon is like a mini logo that also serves as a visual shortcut or visual cue, allowing customers to quickly and easily click on the image they recognize without having to read all the text next to it. And that is exactly what branding is all about. People instantly recognize your ‘brand’, logo or favicon and know who you are. This begins building trust and credibility in the mind of your customers and they feel more comfortable buying from you or hiring your services.

Which in the list of bookmarks below catches your eye and makes you want to click?

As you can see above, without a favicon, you get just a default image of a piece of paper in Firefox or the ‘e’ logo in Microsoft’s Explorer browser.

When creating a favicon, your entire logo will likely not fit because the image is so small (16 x 16 pixels). A good favicon is clear and legible. You may choose just the first letter of your company name or a small image that reflects your business (like a cluster of grapes for a winery, or a hand weight for an exercise gym). Putting a favicon on your website is very simple, but something your webmaster must do. It requires converting the image to a favicon.ico file, inputting some HTML code and uploading it all to the server.

Open your bookmarks or favorites list right now. As you can see, many sites are not taking advantage of the power of a favicon, so be sure to mention to whomever designs your site that you want one and think about what it will look like. A smart marketer uses every available tool to his advantage. Now you’re a smart marketer too. Make your site memorable and easily identifiable from the start. Continue Reading »

Popularity: 46% [?]

A page’s title is located in the blue (usually) bar at the top of your screen. For example, the title bar on this page says “Small Business Websites >> Blog Archive >> What Can a Page Title Do For My Business?” Page titles are the single most important thing in optimizing your site for search engines. The term ’site optimization’ simply means doing all the little tricks and tips necessary to help your site rank high in search engine searches. While there are a lot of other things to consider in optimizing your site as well, right now we’re going to focus strictly on the title.

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Popularity: 69% [?]

Many webmasters rent space on a server in order to provide hosting to their customers for a fee. This way, they have more control over the technical aspects of the server, can load certain software easily and keep your site running optimally. While this sounds like a good idea, I do NOT recommend it for four reasons: Continue Reading »

Popularity: 42% [?]

‘Hosting’ is a service provided by a company in which they store your website’s files on their server. A ’server’ is really just a computer that stores information and makes it available over the internet. Without hosting, your website cannot be viewed by anyone. Your webmaster will upload or send your site’s files to your host’s server (computer). Now, when you type in www.yoursite.com, it will show up. If you don’t have hosting, typing in www.yoursite.com will just take you to an error page or a temporary page that usually says something like “This website coming soon.”

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Popularity: 38% [?]

While Domain Nameservers (DNS) and IP addresses might sound overwhelming, they’re really not. Before you can type in www.mysite.com and have it actually go to your site, your nameservers and/or an IP address must be set up. It’s like giving a friend directions to your house. The nameservers and IP addresses are giving directions to where your website is, so it can show it to you.

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Popularity: 40% [?]

Some companies have been promoting private registration when registering your domain name. There are three levels of registration and anything above regular (or basic) will cost you extra each year. You may find this extra cost entirely worth it, depending upon your needs. To understand how each level is different, you need to understand the WhoIs database and its querying capabilities.

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Popularity: 39% [?]

Yours, yours, always yours, without question. You own your business, you should also own your domain name. You don’t want your house under someone else’s name. If you have a partnership or LLC, make sure the domain is registered under the company name. If you end up parting ways, the domain name doesn’t belong to one specific person and can be taken care of fairly.

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Popularity: 45% [?]

There are literally hundreds of companies through which you can register a domain name. Some are more well-known than others. If you’re going to host your website with a certain company and they also offer domain registration, this can simplify things for you by keeping them all in one place.

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Popularity: 45% [?]

It’s said that registering your domain name for 5-10 years is the best option.
There are three reasons why this is true:
1) Google takes your site more seriously if you’re registered for longer lengths of time and will give you a higher search engine ranking than someone registered for only one year.
2) Inflation. While domain costs haven’t increased a lot in the last few years, that’s not to say they won’t, so registering for a longer length of time now can save you money in the long run.
3) Saves you time and hassle. The less you have to deal with small details like renewing domain names, the more time you have to devote to making your business successful.

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Popularity: 85% [?]

As you’ve no doubt seen, domain names come in all kinds of endings, called domain name extensions. The only domain extensions I use and most highly recommend are .com and .net. Read more about each below:

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Popularity: 63% [?]