Stop Errors. Get Better Rankings?

There are two files almost every search engine always looks for when visiting a site. One is a robots.txt file and one is a favicon.ico file.

Even if you don't want to stop a search engine spider from not indexing any of your pages, it's always a good idea to add a blank robots.txt file to your website. Just open NotePad or TextEdit and save an empty file named robots.txt. Now upload that file to your websites main directory. Search engine spiders will find it, however they should act no differently.

Search engine bots also seem to look for a file called favicon.ico. This is a little graphic that appears before the address in the address bar in Firefox, Safari and sometimes Internet Explorer. It's also that little icon that shows up in your bookmarks when you bookmark a site. To make it show up you have to do a few things.
1) Create a 16x16 graphic in your favorite graphic program.
2) Save it as an .ico file, or a .bmp file, and name it favicon. If you saved it out as a .bmp file just rename it to favicon.ico
3) Upload it to the main directory of your website.
4) In your files add this line of code: <link rel="SHORTCUT ICON" href="favicon.ico">

That's it. Interestingly enough, Firefox doesn't need that code in order for it to see favicon files It automatically detects them. It's also good to note that Internet Explorer will not show this file until you bookmark a site. Most other browsers will show it whenever you navigate to a site.

There is no proof that either of these two tips will improve your ranking, however they can't hurt. Plus, they decrease the amount of errors that your site creates because the files can now be found.