"What are the favicon, robots.txt, and 404 (page not found) items ?"

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Short Answer:

These are items that pertain to your hosting

• Favicon: This is the icon, or image, that appears in someones bookmarks (in their browser), as well as in the browser bar for some browsers (like Firefox)
• robots.txt: This file can tell search engines and other spiders to avoid indexing certain parts of your site. If for example, if you had a page on your website, that real visitors could see, but you wanted to tell Google not to spider (e.g. put into its search engine results)everything in a folder called "secret" then you could define that there.
• 404 Error - Page not found: this means someone tried to access a page that does not exist. this can happen for a variety of reasons including:
  • Pages that are broken on your site. Try browsing around the pages of your site to try to find broken pages.
  • a page that was indexed on the search engines and is no longer there, and yet the search engine has not updated its index
  • spammers/hackers are trying to visit random pages on your website that may or may not exist, looking for common software programs that contain exploits (e.g. PHPbb Bullitin Boards, WordPress, etc...)

Detailed Explanation:

As for the Favicon, there are plenty of free tutorials online for making your own, however, you may find that not having a favicon is more helpful as you can use this to figure out how many people are bookmarking your site. Internet Explorer will cause your webstats to show this hit (or error) every time someone bookmarks your site, which can be very valuable information to some.

The robots.txt file can also be learned about (just use your favorite search engine); however, this is not rael important as all modern search engines don't need this file in order to know that they can spider your whole website; it is uncommon to need to protect directories like this since most companies just password protect ones with sensitive data (using php code). Some advanced users use this file to try to stop bad spiders/scrapers and such, but the worst scrapers ignore the robots.txt file anyways.

404 errors can be difficult to diagnose, although some advanced analytics programs such as Google Analytics (which is free to use) may or may not offer deeper insight to the specific requests. Browsing your website for errors may be the easiest way for the average person to find broken pages, or using a program like Xenu (free) may show you a list of broken pages.  Most often, you will find that people trying to access invalid pages is the biggest culprit.  i usually get around 1% to 2% of my total site traffic that is 404 errors.  This is even true when the website is only one page.