Favicon is short for favorite icon and some call it the .ico file, and its a great way to brand your blog and stand out from the rest of the blogs or websites out there. Go to a site like Gmail, see the nice little red mail icon before the url in your address bar, well that is a favicon. There are lots of advantage of having a favicon, below are few of them:

 * Since most people are using tabbed browsers it helps your blog stand out from the rest of the tabs
* Your blog will stand out and in a list of bookmarks
* If you design your favicon correctly people will recognize your site instantly

How to create one easily

If you are good at designing and have Photo Shop you can download some plug-ins and create one yourself. I personally use http://www.genfavicon.com/ , it allows you to crop the image to your liking and give you the option to set your preferred size for the icon as well. By far the easiest method I found to create a favicon.

How to host them free

If you are using self hosted Wordpress you can upload the ico file to your server. But if you are using blogspot you cant do this and not every free photo sharing site lets you upload favicons. If you are using blogspot as your blogging platform or don't have hosting of your own http://www.iconj.com/icon_generator.php  is a good place to try. After uploading the image you want, it creates the favicon for you and you can download it if you want and if you want them to host it it gives the link to the image , so you can easily add it to your blog. Very helpful if your not that good at technical stuff.

How to add it to your blog

Now that you created the favicon and hosted it somewhere its time to add it to your blog. Go to the header section of your blog and add the following code between the header tags and your done.

<link href='your url' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/x-icon'/>

Make sure to change the 'your url' to the correct one. It should look something like http://abc.com/favicon.ico

Nishadha Silva blogs about blog improvement, blog branding and tweaking Wordpress and Blogger to your liking. Visit http://rumblinglankan.com  for more great tips about branding and improving your blog