edskii

yep you have to add your site to google's rankings (the link above)use several meta tags to help your site. for example using the tag "<meta name="Revisit-After" content="10 Days">" will get google to revisit and update your page every 10 days. this is useful if you have a popular site that gets updated content very frequently. Here's a list of several other meta tags:<meta name="Author" content=""><meta name="description" content=""><meta name="abstract" content=""><meta name="keywords" content=""><meta name="Publisher" content=""><meta name="copyright" content=""><meta name="Publisher-Email" content=""><meta name="ROBOTS" content=""><meta name="audience" content="">hope this helps

try using Photoshop, and download some decent brushes at deviantART.com logo's dont usually have backgrounds like that, its quite boring to look at.

there are also a few helpful tutorials regarding favicon creation here http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ hope this helps