SEO By The Page – 8. Other Head Links

The HTML <link /> tag is a useful way to add function to an HTML/XHTML document without adding an excessive number of lines to the page. As explained in another article in this series on cascading style sheets (CSS) this is important for search engine optimization (SEO). There are other things that can be linked, and some things that must be linked, in order to be included in your web page.

If you look up at the top of your browser while reading this article you will see on the page tab and/or in the address bar a small icon that has the letters OSA in blue with a blue line above and below the letters. This is called a favorites icon or favicon for short. If you didn't notice these before you will probably notice them on many pages now. They help add to the branding of a site and tie pages from the same company together.

You can assign one of these to your own web pages. First you need to create a special .ico graphic file, place the favicon on your web hosting server where your web page is stored and add a link, like the following:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicons/favicon.ico" />

that points to where the favicon is stored. This is just one expample of available uses for the link tag. There are many others but most go beyond the scope of SEO. Using the link tag to move content off the main document, though, is always good SEO practice.