Jennifer Slegg - Search Engine Marketing Consultant |

You know those little favicons, where people try and make something resembling their logo appear in a teeny, tiny 16×16 pixel image. They show up in the navigation bar of many browsers and also appear in browser bookmarks or favorites (hence the name favicons which was shortened from favorites icon). But while they definitely have the coolness factor, especially if you manage to capture your site’s look successfully in the favicon, does your site really need to incorporate one? The answer, surprisingly, is yes.

A few years ago, favicons were only seen on a handful of sites, either super geeky ones or big brand ones. But since then, favicons have been becoming more mainstream and much more common to see. So while they have been gaining popularity, some savvy marketers are using them for branding as well as to encourage repeat visitors. But how, you might ask?

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How many times have you seen a hot looking navigation structure, only to discover it is practically useless when you tried to actually use it? Or when you are trying to find a site in the search results, but the site’s entire Google snippet consists of nothing but the list of categories taken from the site’s navigation?

When designing a site’s navigation structure, it is one area where it is crucial to carefully balance the needs of usability with the needs of search engine optimization. And unfortunately, it is one area that non-SEO web designers tend to excel on one or the other, but rarely both. There are several things you need to consider when designing your site’s navigation structure, so that you don’t discover problems with it down the road when wondering why your bounce rate is so high or why your pages aren’t being indexed as well as they should.
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