Search Engine Optimization, Is It Worth It?

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Search Engine Optimization | Response: 0

One of the trendiest takes on Internet marketing these days seems to be the notion that securing top search engine rankings “no longer works.” Where it started, I have no idea.

But rarely does a week go by when I don’t see one or more Internet marketing “experts” claiming that search engine positioning is largely a waste of time and should not be a primary focus of Website owners.

Well, as the saying goes, “there are two sides to every story.”

But let’s not make this article about my side, or your side, or anyone else’s side. Let’s forget about my opinion and other “expert’s” opinions and stick to the indisputable facts, as reported by highly credible third party sources:

According to a Forrester Research Media Field Study, getting a loyal audience in the first place is best done by Search Engine Placement.

According to a GVU Users Survey, 84.8% of Internet users use Search Engines to find Websites.

In a study released by ActivMedia Research in September 1999, Search Engine Positioning was ranked as the #1 Website promotional method used by eCommerce sites.

And look what I just found in the April 2000 issue of Target Marketing Magazine.
“Top Ways Websites are Discovered”

Banner ads: 1%

Targeted email: 1.2%

TV spots: 1.4%

“By accident”: 2.1%

Magazine ads: 4.4%

Word-of-mouth: 20%

Random Surfing: 20%

Search Engines: 46%

You’ve now seen the numbers and know that search engine promotion is very much alive and kicking. But let’s take this a step further. Let’s talk about the *quality* of prospects coming to your Website through search engines as opposed to other advertising mediums.

Every time your potential customers use the search engines, they qualify themselves as *hot prospects* by conducting searches on keywords that are directly related to your product or service. Their choice of keywords is proof that they have a genuine interest in what you offer. These people spend their valuable time exploring the search engines for your type of product or service.

Think About That.

They didn’t stumble upon one of your ads, or wander past a hyperlink to your site. And they didn’t get a banner ad thrown in their face. They made the *decision* to actively search the keywords that brought them to YOUR Website. And when they get there, they are ready and willing to do business with you. At the very least, they’re seriously considering it and, that’s the most powerful sales tool you can have!

But merely getting your Website “indexed” or listed in the search engines is not enough. In order to get any significant traffic from the search engines, your Website must be listed within the top 30 search results (preferably the top 20).

Very rarely will anyone look beyond the first 30 results returned from a search. This makes perfect sense because the most relevant sites are always listed at the top. So if your prospect doesn’t find what they want within the first 20 to 30 listings, they’ll simply do a new search.

If your site falls anywhere below the 30th listing, you don’t stand a chance against anyone in the TOP-20. Hence, it should be your goal to achieve Top 20 positions.

How Do You Get Your Website Listed In The Top 20?

1) You can attempt to gain these Top 20 rankings yourself. However, this can easily become a full time job. (I think this is why so many marketers advise against focusing on search engine positioning.)

2) You can hire a reputable company who can achieve AND maintain your Top 20 rankings for you (be sure they guarantee their service and have several verifiable clients that currently have multiple Top 20 rankings).

3) You can do nothing at all. But as you’ve seen from the third party statistics referenced above, search engine positioning is something you can’t afford to ignore.

Whatever choice you make, I hope that your eyes have been opened to the tremendous profit potential that exists with top search engine placement.

Article written by Lee

Tips For Submitting To TGP’s

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: TGP | Response: 0

One of the most popular ways for getting traffic to sites these days is to submit galleries to TGP’s and because it is so popular there is a lot of competition for getting listed. If you like, it is a buyer’s (TGP’s) market, with the supply of galleries exceeding the demand. For example, at Richard’s Realm we only list about 60% of the galleries submitted and that’s after we’ve filtered out unwanted free hosts, free email addresses and submission bots. If we didn’t do that we would be listing about 20%-30% of all submissions.

Before you begin

Submitting to TGP’s is a numbers game. It’s all about volume and percentages. The amount of money your gallery generates can be estimated using a formula with 4 elements:

Total Hits To Gallery X Click Through Ratio X Signup Ratio X $ Per Signup = Total Revenue

So, for example, 1 in 25 surfers to your gallery clicks on a banner or a link, you use a sponsor paying $30 a signup and you have a 1:400 signup ratio with them from your TGP traffic. The formula then becomes:

Total Hits To Gallery X 4% X 0.25% X $30 = Total Revenue

You can see now that the only thing remaining that will affect your Total Revenue is the Total Hits To Gallery. If you increase the Total Hits To Gallery the Total Revenue will also increase.

Of course, experienced TGP submitters also know that you can work on improving the other elements of the formula to improve Total Revenue. They tweak their galleries and change banner and link placement to maximize the Click Through Ratio. If it is improved and rises from 1 in 25 (4%) to 1 in 20 (5%), their Total Revenue increases overall by 20%.

Building the gallery

Examine the formula above and you will see that two elements can be manipulated at the gallery building stage: Click Through Ratio and Signup Ratio.

It is always said, and surprisingly often overlooked, but select a sponsor for a gallery which complements the gallery’s content. For example, if you build a big tits gallery use a big tits sponsor. With more and more TGP’s becoming categorized people surfing the big tits category will be looking for bit tits and are more likely to be interested in a big tits sponsor!

In addition, be sure to use sponsors which are not overly-used, sponsors which are little known. If you go through a TGP you will see the same sponsors and banners showing up all the time. If a surfer sees a banner 10 times they are only going to click on it the once. So even if you build the perfect gallery with top notch banner placement and pictures, if the surfer clicked on the same banner on the previous gallery they’re not going to click on yours!

Selecting TGP’s

There are hundreds of TGP’s you can submit to. It is usually advantageous to select TGP’s that only post your type of gallery, as well as the more generic ones. For example, submit to TGP’s which only list big tit galleries or galleries with one-legged midget lesbians (if that’s your niche). The more targeted traffic will usually result in better click-through ratios and better signups, especially if you’re using a new or little-known sponsor for the particular niche.

TGP’s with a moderate level of traffic that send a few hundred hits tend to be quite good. Admittedly, to get any real volume you need to submit to quite a few, but consider using TGSW to do the bulk of it. My reasoning for using the smaller TGP’s is that they tend to list fewer pages and the surfers tend to be less “professional” and adept at dodging banners.

Submitting your gallery

There are no real tricks to this bit, but it is very important to remember that TGP’s usually get far more submissions than they need or want. You must try your best not to give them a reason to reject your gallery:

• Read the rules carefully and follow them. The TGP webmaster doesn’t put them there for fun and if you break them it’s possible you will be blacklisted.
• Look at the galleries already listed on the TGP to get some idea of what the webmaster likes.
• Don’t try to be smart and use different names and email addresses to avoid the per webmaster submission limits. Although galleries can look very different, reviewers have a good memory and can often recognize designs, layouts and descriptions. If they spot you trying to cheat you’ll probably end up getting blacklisted.
• Take a look at their TGP and see what kind of description they like, Adult Buffet have very different descriptions to Richards-Realm. This might not determine whether or not you get listed, but it’s a chance to get a good description of your choice and, hopefully, more hits.
• Select the right category for your gallery. If you submit your gallery to the “Teens” category and it should be in the “Mature Women” category it will get put there or rejected. If you get the gallery listed in the wrong category you may get more hits, but if a surfer is expecting a nice young lady in the pictures he’s just going to hit his back button and look at the next gallery in the list – probably not even giving your banners a chance to load.

Monitoring your gallery

Once you’ve submitted your gallery you should keep an eye on how it performs. View the stats to see who listed you, how many hits they sent and how much you made from the gallery. It is even worthwhile to create galleries dedicated to specific TGP’s, so you can monitor their performance even more closely. If a TGP sends lots of hits but no signups it’s probably worth no longer submitting to them or changing the gallery to see if you can improve the click throughs or signups. Compare before and after stats if you make changes in the gallery layout or sponsor to see if they’re working.

Whatever you do keep tweaking and monitoring your galleries to get the best possible performance for each of the elements in the revenue formula.

Article written by Richard

Building Your Own Opt In Mailing List

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Opt-in Mail | Response: 0

Despite the constant launch of ‘new and improved’ email collection programs one of the more popular emails I receive each month ask how webmasters can actually start their own opt-in email list for surfers. Surprisingly enough, this is a fairly simple process and, should only realistically take a webmaster 10-15 minutes to have an opt-in email script installed.

However, the second type of email I get from webmasters who have already installed one of these scripts is asking how they can ensure that surfers sign up to their lists this is what I will approach in this article.

One of the easiest ways to make sure surfers join your opt0in list is to offer them a financial gain by doing so, I don’t mean you should literally pay them for their email address but, why not offer them something for free? A daily picture by email, free porn site access etc etc.

The next biggest mistake I find are that webmasters simply place a collection box saying something like ‘enter your email address here for our newsletter’ and, lets be honest, it isn’t very enticing. Ideally you need to have a ‘headline’ that will catch the surfers attention and actually ‘make’ them want to join your list. Be specific yet be vague (bit hard I know) and you’ll soon see your list grow from one new subscriber a week to hundreds of them!

The next thing you need to take into consideration is how quickly, not only your site, but the page with your collection box loads, if you are using a pop-up console, make sure it is heavy in text not graphics with the first words at the top not saying ‘free porn’ but a similar meaning text, everyone and their dog has seen the words ‘free porn’ on countless other porn sites. Yours NEEDS to stand out!

You should use an effective title if you are going to be using pop-up windows for your email collection. in the title bar don’t have the window called ‘pop-up’ have it named appropriately for the niche you are trying to collect the surfers email address from. Make it relevant, make it concise.

Balance the collection page, any type of page you build for your site should at least be appealing to the eye. Meaning that your fonts, colors and actual text need to contrast together perfectly. If you do use images on this page try to have them prominent yet not overbearing to the surfer.

Offer a way to close a pop-up if this is what you are using to collect the emails after all, they (the surfer) may decide they don’t want to give you their email until they have seen what your site can offer. In the same way, make sure you have a link from your sites to your collection page so, if a surfer decides they do want to give you their email address they can do it without the need of closing your site and reloading it afresh.

Overall however, the best rule you can follow is to keep to the point and keep it simple. This way you will gain the surfers attention quickly and easily and, the surfer will not be distracted from the main purpose of having them on your site – getting to your sponsor.

Hopefully the information above will enable you to start having some more success with your traffic and, once you have the surfers email address make sure you treat it with the respect you would want your own to be treat with, an email address is a sacred thing to most surfers, if you Spam them daily they will leave your opt-in list quickly however, if you send them a ‘newsletter’ once a week / month filled with relevant information you will soon find your list growing exponentially.

Article written by Lee.

Adult Webmaster Conventions

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: General | Response: 0

Networking Overload

Cascading Style Sheet Basics

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) have been around for a while now, and act as a complement to plain old HTML files.

Style sheets allow a developer to separate HTML code from formatting rules and styles. It seems like many HTML beginners’ under-estimate the power and flexibility of the style sheet. In this article, I’m going to describe what cascading style sheets are, their benefits, and two ways to implement them.

Cascading What’s?

They’re what chalk is to cheese, what ice-cream is to Jell-O they complement HTML and allow us to define the style (look and feel) for our entire site in just one file!

They get their name from the fact that each different style declaration can be “cascaded” under the one above it, forming a parent-child relationship between the styles.

They were quickly standardized, and both Internet Explorer and Netscape built their latest browser releases to match the CSS standard (or, to match it as closely as they could).

So, you’re still wondering what a style sheet is? A style sheet is a free-flowing document that can either be referenced by, or included into a HTML document (Kind of like using SSI to call a file but not, if that makes sense). Style sheets use blocks of formatted code to define styles for existing HTML elements, or new styles, called ‘classes’.

Style sheets can be used to change the height of some text, to change the background color of a page, to set the default border color of a table the list goes on and on. Put simply though, style sheets are used to set the formatting, color scheme and style of an HTML page.

Style sheets should really be used instead of the standard , < b >, < i > and < u > tags because:

One style sheet can be referenced from many pages, meaning that each file is kept to a minimum size and only requires only extra line to load the external style sheet file

If you ever need to change any part of your sites look/feel, it can be done quickly and only needs to be done in one place: the style sheet and furthermore, it is done globally.

With cascading style sheets, there are many page attributes that simply cannot be set without them: individual tags can have different background colors, borders, indents, shadows, etc.

Style sheets can either be inline (included as part of a HTML document), or, referenced externally (Contained in a separate file and referenced from the HTML document). Inline style sheets are contained wholly within a HTML document and will only change the look and layout of that HTML file.

Open your favorite text editor and enter the following code. Save the file as styles.html and open it in your browser:

Cascading Style Sheet Example.

h1
{
color: #636594;
font-family: Verdana;
size: 18pt;
}

This is one big H1 tag!

When you fire up your browser, you should see the text “This is one big H1 tag!” in a large, blue Verdana font face.

Let’s step through the style code step by step. Firstly, we have a pretty standard HTML header. The page starts with the tag followed by the tag. Next, we use a standard tag to set the title of the page we are working with.

Notice, though, that before the tag is closed, we have our tag, its contents, and then the closing tag.

h1
{
color: #636594;
font-family: Verdana;
size: 18pt;
}

When you add the style sheet code inline (as part of the HTML document), it must be bound by and tags respectively. Our example is working with the tag. We are changing three attributes of the ’s style: the text color (color), the font that any tags on the page will be displayed in (font-family), and lastly, the size of the font (size).

The code between the { and } are known as the attributes. Our sample code has three. Try changing the hexadecimal value of the color attribute to #A00808 and then save and refresh the page. You should see the same text, just colored red instead of blue.

An Example Of An External Style Sheet.

External style sheets are similar to internal style sheets, however, they are stripped of the and tags, and need to be referenced from another HTML file to be used.

Create a new file called “whatever.css” and enter the following code into it:

h1
{
color: #a00808;
font-family: Verdana;
size: 18pt
}

Next, create a HTML file and name it test.html. Enter the following code into test.html:

External Style Sheet Reference Example.

This is one big H1 tag!

As mentioned above, you can see that the actual code in whatever.css is exactly the same as it was in the inline example. In our HTML file, we simply place a tag in the section of our page. The rel=”stylesheet” attribute tells the browser that the link to the external file is a style sheet. The type=”text/css” attribute tells the browser that whatever.css is a text file containing CSS (cascading style sheet) declarations. Lastly, the href=”whatever.css” attribute tells the browser that the actual file we want to load is whatever.css.

Conclusion.

Well, there you have it, a quick look at style sheets and how to implement both an inline and external version. Checkout the links below if you’ve never worked with cascading style sheets before. You will be surprised at some of the things you can do with them!

Article written by Lee.

Using .htaccess Effectively

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

The .htaccess file is an ASCII text document that can be placed in any directory on your site. It can be used to control access to files and directories, and customize some server operation in your site. A .htaccess file can be created in any word processor but must be saved as text only. You must use FTP software in ASCII mode to upload or edit your .htaccess file. For the examples provided here, place the .htaccess file in your root directory.

There are a variety of functions that you can control using .htaccess some of the more useful of these are explained below:

Custom Error Messages.

Add the following to the .htaccess file::

ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html

After “ErrorDocument” specify the error code, followed by a space, and then the path and filename of the .html file you would like to be displayed when the specified error is generated, each specific error code is detailed below with the recommended codes to be used in the .htaccess file in bold :

200 OK
206 Partial content
301 Document moved permanently
302 Document found elsewhere
304 Not modified since last retrieval
400 Bad request
403 Access forbidden
404 Document not found
408 Request timeout
500 Internal server error
501 Request type not supported

Using the codes above your error section of the .htaccess file should look like this:

ErrorDocument 301 /notfound.html
ErrorDocument 400 /notfound.html
ErrorDocument 403 /notfound.html
ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html
ErrorDocument 500 /notfound.html
ErrorDocument 501 /notfound.html

Redirect to a Different Folder.

Add the following to the .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/oldfolder(.*)$ /newfolder/$1 [R]

This redirects the user from /oldfolder/anyfile.html to /newfolder/anyfile.html, when the .htaccess file is uploaded to the otherwise empty “/oldfolder” directory.

Denying User Access.

Add the following to the .htaccess file:

<Limit GET>
order allow,deny
deny from 000.00.00.
deny from 000.000.000.000
allow from all
</Limit>

This is an example of a .htaccess file that will block access to your site to anyone who is coming from any IP address beginning with 000.00.00 and from the specific IP address 000.000.000.000 . By specifying only part of an IP address, and ending the partial IP address with a period, all sub-addresses coming from the specified IP address block will be blocked. You must use the IP addresses to block access, use of domain names is not supported

Redirect a Machine Name.

Add the following to the .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteBase /
# Rewrite Rule for machine.domain-name.net
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} machine.domain-name.net $
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !machine/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ machine/$1

This will redirect requests for the machine name machine.domain-name.net to the directory machine on the site domain-name.net.

Different Default Home Page.

Add the following to the .htaccess file:

DirectoryIndex filename.html

Then a request for http://domain-name.net/ would return http://domain-name.net/filename.html if it exists, or would list the directory if it did not exist.

To automatically run a cgi script, add the following to the .htaccess file:

DirectoryIndex /cgi-local/index.pl

This would cause the CGI script /cgi-bin/index.pl to be executed.

If you place your .htaccess file containing the DirectoryIndex specification in the root directory of your site, it will apply for all sub-directories at your site.

Preventing Hot Linking.

Add the following to the .htaccess file:

# Rewrite Rule for images
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} <URL of page accessing your domain>
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://<same as above URL>

You would replace the <URL of page accessing your domain> above with the domain name and path of the page that is referring to your domain. For example: www.theirdomain.com/users/mypage/

The RewriteCond directive states that if the {HTTP_REFERER} matches the URL that follows, then use the RewriteRule directive. The RewriteRule directive will redirect any reference back to the referring web page.

Using the above you should, safely be able to publish your sites on the internet knowing that you will not be privy to bandwidth thieves via hotlinking and also, that you will not lose any traffic through pages that are ‘not found’.

Article Written By Lee

Converting Chinese Adult Traffic – The Niche Paysites That Work

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

Converting German Adult Traffic – The Niche Paysites That Work

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Traffic | Response: 0

With the rapid development of US companies and webmasters looking to attract a larger percentage of international surfers and, wanting to make money off these surfers I thought it would be an idea to share the most prevalent niches for each of the international markets country specific surfers. In this first article we will take a look at the niches which convert best on German oriented surfer traffic.

German Traffic – Dispelling The Myths.

First and foremost I think it would be a good idea to let you know that, strangely enough, not all German surfers are looking for kinky, in your face sex, in fact, they pretty much have the same tendencies towards their online porn as US based surfers do, with that in mind, lets take a look at some of the niches that do convert well on German traffic.

German Traffic – The Niches.

As with any type of surfer the best way of getting them to convert is to start targeting them from the second they hit your site using Full Page Ads, localized text links and, consoles, over the last 3 (three) months we found that the niches which converted best on German porn surfers were as follows.

Amateur.

The German adult surfers we sent to several amateur sites, including live web-cam sites and paysites converted exceptionally well, it would certainly seem from the last three months of stats that German porn surfers like the ‘amateur’ porn angle when it comes to satisfying themselves online.

Teen.

As with the US adult surfer, it would appear that the teen niche is truly a global requisite in fact, the teen niche was one of our best converting niches across the globe when we analyzed our international traffic conversion ratios.

Gay.

To our surprise the little German traffic we did send to localized German gay sites converted at less than 1:75, bearing in mind that the best converting niche for us was Teen and, that the specific site we sent the teen traffic to converted overall at around 1:138 we will be targeting a lot more German gay traffic in the future.

Fetish.

No mystery here, when we started our filtering process we ensured that the various fetish niches were high on our filtering list, after all, everyone seems to know that German porn surfers are looking for the hard to find hardcore scene and, the general fetish niche seemed to work wonderfully.

Ebony.

The ebony niche was a vary profitable one for the traffic we filtered to it, in summary, my personal feelings are that it converted so well because ebony men and women in Germany are very few and far between, again the results for this niche would seem to back-up the fact that giving Germans access to something that might be ‘taboo’ in their country converts their traffic well.

Other Niches.

In addition to the above niches which converted above and beyond the others we used we did get a few sales to some more micro-niched paysites for example, BBW, Asian, Cumshot and General Hardcore sites had around 3-5 sales per site, per pay period. Given that we did not target this type of traffic as effectively as we could have done and, that the traffic was from TGP’s and Geo Targeted Traffic Brokers we were happy with the results we saw.

German Adult Traffic – The Results.

It would seem, given our results from the 3 month test we ran on our traffic that the top converting niches for German adult surfers are the Amateur, Teen and Gay niches. Although, the rest of the niches we filtered out our traffic to did not convert as we would have hoped we still saw a good rate of sales month on month from the previous pay period.

When all is said and done, as long as you have German porn surfers on your sites you would be wise to start spreading and filtering this traffic to some niches that, perhaps you wouldn’t have ordinarily targeted after all, a sale is more money in your pocket, whether you know the niche or not.

Article written by Le

New European V.A.T Laws – Are You Prepared?

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Billing Solutions | Response: 0

Under a new law that has been passed in the EU from July 1st 2003 any internet based company selling services or goods to customers inside the EU will have to pay the member state of their customer/client the equivalent V.A.T (Value Added Tax) Rate.

This in itself is not a big problem, online business have been paying taxes for many years, the problems start to occur when you take a look at the current state of the V.A.T system in the EU state members on an individual basis.

The following list shows the percentage of V.A.T that you will need to add to your clients bills if they are located inside a member state of the EU:

Austria – 20% VAT
Belgium – 21% VAT
Denmark – 25% VAT
Finland – 22% VAT
France – 19.6% VAT
Germany – 16% VAT
Greece – 18% VAT
Ireland – 21% VAT
Italy – 20% VAT
Luxembourg – 15% VAT
Netherlands – 19% VAT
Portugal – 17% VAT
Spain – 16% VAT
Sweden – 25% VAT
United Kingdom – 17.5% VAT

This will pose several problems for the adult industry namely, how will our billing processors be able to handle transactions from European Union citizens? After all, with so many different VAT rates across the EU their billing systems need to be able to correctly calculate the correct amount of VAT to the surfers final order.

Several accounting firms have set up new divisions to handle this for the mainstream side of the internet industry however, until just recently, the adult internet was unaware this was happening.

It would seem that although the international market place is a wholly viable one for adult webmasters to break into, it brings with it more complications that simply breaking the language barrier.

This new law will be a good test of the adult industry processors to see how they can handle the economic changes of the global market place and, more importantly, how they handle the new frontiers of international marketing on a global scale.

Article written by Lee

Favicon.ico – What Does It Do?

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

Favicon.ico is the name of the graphic Internet Explorer 5+ uses in the address bar and when someone views their favorite bookmarks. There should be one beside the address of this page now if you are using IE5+. If you want to see favicon.ico in action among your favorites bookmark our site now by right clicking and selecting ‘Add to favorites’.

Internet Explorer looks for this file in the same directory as the HTML page currently being displayed, if it cant find favicon.ico it will then display the default Internet Explorer icon in the address bar. As for viewing of favorites, IE will check its temporary folder to see if favicon.ico is there again, if it is not located it will display the default white background with a blue ‘e’ icon.

For a webmaster there are three main advantages to using the favicon.ico ‘trick’.

The first, is that it helps to brand your site with a nice little icon that is easy to recognize.

The second, is that it makes your website more professional.

The third, is that your entry will stand out in surfers bookmarks over the others. This is especially good as, if you can get a surfer back to your site then you have another chance at making a sale.

Many internet users have a multitude of site bookmarks so, you need to use favicon.ico to give you an edge. I highly recommend using it and, now I’m going to tell you how.

First, you will need to create an icon file which is exactly 16 x 16 pixels. If the icon is larger or smaller IE5+ will just ignore it. As for the colors in it, 16 is standard. You can use more colors if you want but, the more colors you use, the larger the .ico file becomes and, the longer it takes to load.

You now know the standards the favicon.ico file has to be, now to actually create this file you can take one of two routes.

The first is to convert and existing 16 x 16 BMP or GIF graphic with 16-32 colors into an .ico file using converter software making sure to save it as favicon.ico.

You know the standards the favicon.ico file has to be, now to actually create favicon.ico . The easiest way of creating a favicon.ico file is to convert an existing 16 X 16 BMP or GIF graphic with 16 – 32 colors into a .ico file using converter software making sure to save it as favicon.ico.

Once you have created your favicon.ico file all you need to do is to upload it to any directory on your server that contains html pages. This way, when IE5+ searches for favicon.ico it will be bale to find it regardless of which page you are on.

That’s nearly all the areas of favicon.ico covers apart from, what if you want different icons for different parts of your website? Can this be done? The answer is yes it can. All you have to do is place the following HTML code between the <head> and </head> tags of your web page.

<LINK REL=”SHORTCUT ICON” HREF=”differenticon.ico”> (SHORTCUT ICON should be kept in uppercase).

Now when someone adds a web page with that code to their favorites, IE5+ will not look for favicon.ico but will look for differenticon.ico and if it’s there it will display it, if not the default icon will be displayed.

Using favicon.ico or the SHORTCUT ICON code is nice way to add a unique touch to your site, and of course will result in more repeat visitors than if you were not using it – which is always good for any webmaster.

Article Written By Le