Have you ever noticed a company’s logo appearing next to their web address in your browser’s address window, like this Qantas example? Usually, your browser’s default symbol would appear (e.g. the Internet Explorer ‘e’), but it can be customised to a company’s logo, something that we in the web industry call a "favicon" (short for "favourite icon"). Look through your own favourites list and you will probably notice that the companies that have used favicons are usually pretty prominent companies including banks, airlines and established internet brands like Amazon and Ebay.

Favicons are a cheap and easy way to start pushing your brand, no matter how far into its infancy it may be. If somebody said to you that they were going to place your company’s logo in a spot where potential customers visit nearly every day, you would probably leap at the chance, especially if they said the cost was virtually nothing.

To make matters even more relevant, with the release of Google Notebooks last year (a service that allows Google users to keep their favourites online so they can access them anywhere), it’s becoming increasingly apparent that search engines may start to rank websites in the future based on what visitors deem important enough to bookmark.