Also known as favorite icon, website icon, shortcut icon, url icon, bookmark icon.
The power of marketing is amazing. Humans get accustomed to seeing certain things (like logos) and immediately recognize and have a sense of comfort with that household product. The favicon is an excellent branding tool. Not only does it show up next to the address bar in your browser, but it also is displayed on each tab (assuming you are using a browser that supports tabs), and also in your favorites. The human eye will focus on the icon as soon as it’s recognized and disregard the text.
To create a favicon you must first have an image that will be your logo. The image has to be in either 16x16px or 32x32px size and either 8-bit or 24-bit color. Once your image is selected to easiest way to get it to the proper size/format is to use a website the creates it for you. Google for the word "favicon" and you will get many hits that will allow you to just upload your image and then you can download the finished result. Here are a couple of examples:
http://www.favicon.cc/
http://www.html-kit.com/favicon/
Once you have your image upload it to your webserver. Then, modify the your code between the <head> and </head> of your website with the following text:
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="favicon.ico" >
or
<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://www.yourdomain.com/favicon.ico" >
If you are using WordPress this will be in the header.php file within your theme.
