• Internet Explorer
• Firefox
• Mozilla
• Opera
• Safari

The favicon shows up:

• In Internet browser’s address bar location field
• Next to a site’s name in Internet browser’s bookmark list
• In tabs next to a site’s title in a multi-tab browser
• Next to the site’s feed as shown in many feed readers

If your site’s favicon does not display in certain browsers, review this browser support list.

Favicon Generators

Webmasters can create favicons for their websites by using free web-based favicon generators including:

• favicon.ico Generator
• favicon maker
• 256 Pixels
• Favicon Editor
• Favicon/Icon Generator und Online-Editor
• Genfavicon
• ConvertIcon
• FavIcon from Pics
• Dynamic Drive- FavIcon Generator
• Favicon Generator

Specify the location of your site’s favicion in the page header:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/www.example.com/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

Yola Website Solutions

Choose a solution from Yola.com:

• Yola Free: You are charged nothing, but your site will be hosted on a Yola subdomain (e.g. YourSite.Yola.com).
• Yola Silver: A paid option that will you get everything included in Yola Free, your own domain name, no Yola ads on your web pages, Yahoo Search Marketing / Facebook advertising credits and Fotolia’s stock photography credits.
• Yola Premier: You pay a flat fee for the first year for everything included in Yola Silver, and in subsequent years you will be billed Yola Silver’s fees. You receive one-on-one professional web design consultation when creating your site.

Yola Features

Add features to your Yola site:

• Website templates: Use customizable website templates or create your own templates.
• Payment system: To sell products and/or services through your B2C website, add the built-in Paypal shopping cart to your Yola Website.
• Ads: Earn money by placing Google Adsense ads on your Yola website.
• Maps: Add Google Maps to display your physical location of your business.

Tips to Create Small Websites

• Elements of good website design – Yola offers tutorials on how to put together a good website through Yola’s Sitebuilder tool, after website conceptualization, site flow structure, copy writing, and photo sourcing/editing.
• 15 Essential Checks Before Launching Your Website – Smashing Magazine puts up a website design review list before launching your sites that includes favicon, titles and META data, cross-browser checks, functionality checks, web analytics, XML sitemap, 404 page, and website load time.
• SEO Tips, Marketing Tips for Small Websites – PPC Blog’s suggestion on selecting niche market, business model, domain name, web hosting, site architecture, site usability, keyword research, content development, web analytics and venture capitals can affect how you market and SEO your website of your small business.

Yola’s History

Yola was formerly started out as a start-up firm, Synthasite, by Vinny Lingham.

• SynthaSite Receives $20m Investment
• SynthaSite is Changing it’s Name to Yola
• Why Yola? Why Now?

To make Google recognize your website’s breadcrumb navigation, place the breadcrumb trails closer to the top of your web page’s source code.

What is Breadcrumb Navigation?

Breadcrumb navigation consists of a one-line navigational text links that indicates the site visitor’s current page location within the website’s hierarchy. Breadcrumbs usually appear close to the top of a web page and serves the purpose to optimize site usability.

Breadcrumb navigation is sometimes called breadcrumb trails.

When to Use Breadcrumb Navigation

Site Usability Expert Jakob Nielsen defines site navigation into 2 categories:

• Primary navigation: primary site navigation menus and site search box
• Secondary navigation: breadcrumbs and html sitemaps

Breadcrumbs use a single line of text to show a page’s location in the site hierarchy. While secondary, this navigation technique is increasingly beneficial to users.

Good breadcrumb navigation should:

• Display a visitor’s current location relative to the higher-level web pages of the site.
• Allow one-click access to the higher-level web pages to prevent visitors from getting lost after running site searches. This reduces your site’s bounce rate.
• Take up as little space as possible on the web page.

How to Design Breadcrumb Navigation

Jakob Nielsen explains the design of breadcrumbs must:

• Be a horizontal line.
• Progress from the highest level to the lowest, one step at a time.
• Start with the homepage and end with the current web page.
• Have a short text link for each level except for the current page.
• Breadcrumbs should show the site hierarchy, not the visitor’s history.
• Have a one-character separator between the levels. The optimal breadcrumb separator to use between levels is > (the “forward arrow” or “greater-than symbol”).

Other Tips on Breadcrumb Navigation

Consider the use of breadcrumb navigation for usability and SEO:

• Breadcrumbs In Web Design: Examples and Best Practices – Smashing Magazine explains the definition of breadcrumbs, the types of breadcrumbs (location-based, attribute-based, and path-based), the benefits of using breadcrumbs, mistakes in breadcrumb trail implementation, and breadcrumb navigation design considerations, followed by a breadcrumb navigation showcase.
• Breadcrumb Navigation Examined: Best Practices and Examples – Hongkiat offers the breadcrumb best practices, followed by a breadcrumb navigation showcase.
• Breadcrumb Navigation: Further Investigation of Usage – Wichita.edu’s research paper shows breadcrumb trails are used only 6% of the time during visitors’ site navigation.
• Breadcrumb Navigation Research Studies – Usability.gov’s research proved that frequently returning visitors get the most advantage of breadcrumb navigation and the use of breadcrumbs allow visitors to complete the necessary navigation faster.
• How Breadcrumb Works – Kelikuru believes breadcrumbs work best when hierarchical structure is in good categorization, but can be an issue to keep track of the trail after visitors run keyword searches on the site.

• Niche Market
• Business Model
• Domain Name and Web Hosting
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Site Architecture and Usability
• Keyword Research and Content Development
• Web Analytics
• Marketing
• Venture Capitals
• Persistence

Niche Market

You want to pick your niche market and ensure:

• You will have a head-start to your competitors by being the first company to launch a site in this niche market
• You will still be passionate about the niche in the next 5 to 10 years

Use Google Ad Planner to discover if there are already competitors in this niche market and to clearly define your target audiences (or potential customers).

Business Model

You want to figure out the core values that your small business website will provide to your users and customers. Your site should offer a solution to a problem of your users, by providing a product or a service. Your end goal is to monetize from your website, so you will have to sell the product or service.

With your service or product, you may want to provide a time-limited free trial, or a free membership with limited features. You want to give your users options to upgrade the service to paid memberships.

If at some point it is appropriate, you should also consider increase revenues by offer advertisers to place ads on your site. Unless you are negotiating with each individual advertiser, it will be easier to sign up as publishers on some reputable ad networks. Based on your site’s content, Google Adsense and Google Affiliate Network can target highly relevant ads to your website. Commission Junction is an ad network that offers the largest variety of advertiser offers.

Domain Name and Web Hosting

Your site’s domain name essentially represents your online business’s brand. When choosing your domain name, consider the name’s brand-ability for your audience, and rank-ability and link-ability for search engines. This leaves you two options:

• Keyword-rich domain names
• Brand-able domain names

A keyword-rich domain name allows you to incorporate generic keyword into your domain name. As Google values a keyword within the domain name for ranking purpose, your generic keyword should rank well in the SERP. The disadvantage is that many keyword-rich domain names are too generic which contributes little value to branding.

Good examples of keyword-rich domain names are SearchMarketing.com, SearchEngineStrategies.com, WebMasterWorld.com, SEOBook.com, WebTrends.com, and Hotels.com.

A brand-able domain name is the first essential step to build your brand which gives your site a point of distinction and your users an identity that is memorable. People take your website more seriously and are more likely to link to your site. The downside is that your site may not rank well on generic keywords that describe your products or services.

Good examples of brand-able domain names are Amazon.com, eBay.com, Yahoo.com, Alibaba.com, Digg.com, Ning.com.

Incorporate your SEO geo targeting strategies and choose a reliable web hosting solution to ensure your site’s 100% up-time.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Site Architecture and Usability

When starting small, you will have some advantages over the established big websites in search engine optimization. SEO consists of both on-page and off-page optimization techniques.

With on-page SEO, find the best practices from Google SEO for beginners and best Google SEO resources, and study Google’s, Yahoo’s and Bing’s search algorithms. Google SEO Starter Guide demonstrates Google’s perspectives for optimizing your website.

With off-page SEO, it is all about natural link building and link baits. When increasing Google PageRank, Google is strongly against the deliberate link building via paid links or paid posts.

Site architecture (or internal site structure) is about incorporating the correct internal link architecture with URL structure and page naming convention allows your site the solid foundation for future expansion.

Create good website navigations (main menu and breadcrumbs) to reduce your site visitors’ bounce rates. Optimize the conversion rates by optimizing landing pages and implementing professional design, proper wording, video instructions, and customer reviews.

Keyword Research and Content Development

You must discover the keywords that your potential users or customers actually use when they are searching for your products or services. Create your keyword list related to your products and website using the SEM keyword research tools and Google’s Wonder Wheel tool.

Start by creating the basic content for your website with both your site’s users and SEO in mind:

• SEO Copywriting 2.0
• Content Optimization for Search Engines

With more and more content being created each day, duplicate content issues will eventually arise. Google has explanations about the duplicate content penalty and has also come up with a method for webmasters to tackle canonical URLs.

Web Analytics

Having a business model for monetization, you will then need to measure how your users are using your site and track the ROI.

Google Analytics is a free web analytics tool for this purpose.

Marketing

Your website requires other sources of traffic.

• If you SEO strategy has been set up correctly, it will be easy to advertise on Google Adwords and track your ROI with Adwords Conversion Tracking. Ensure you understand Google Adwords Quality Score before over-spending your marketing budgets
• Consider creating your profiles or pages within and market your site through social marketing sites, including Google Buzz and/or Twitter
• Recruit evangelists or industry experts to promote your services or products, so that other evangelists who are interested will follow
• Advertise on local newspapers to improve your brand awareness

Venture Capitals

Unless you are keeping your business small, once your site’s audience grows bigger and bigger you will need more venture capital funds.

Persistence

You can’t expect your business to be success overnight, so your never-say-die attitude counts a lot!

• Synthasite allows webmasters to create and edit websites online, while traditionally webmasters design web sites offline and upload them to hosting servers.
• It provides users a superstore of DIY-add-on-components such as widgets and templates.
• It allows a real-time platform for multiple web designers to collaboratively edit and create websites from different locations.

In the coming months, new features will be added to Sythasite which include,

• File management
• Social / collaborative site building with chat, sharing and invitations
• Component and template marketplace
• Service marketplace like SEO, graphic design and copywriting
• Blogging
• Content management system
• Affiliate network integration

Synthasite also provides channels of communications via online communities like Facebook and Google Groups, so that webmasters and users can give feedback.

The development of Synthasite is currently being funded by Lingham Capital, Miombo Capital and Incubeta.

Update:

Synthasite was renamed to Yola.com in March 2009.