URL: Explained
Look up at the Address Bar of your browser. See that tt>http://support.blog-city.com/url_explained.htm string there? That is the URL for this webpage, the address of this page on the Internet.
Any item on the Internet can be uniquely addressed using what is known as a Uniform Resource Location (URL). This is an address that contains all the necessary information that will allow us to find and process the item. Lets take a detailed look at a typical URL that takes us to a page deep inside Google.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/1.html
This is a typical URL that you would type into a browser. But how does the browser interpret this URL?
http://www.google.com/webmasters/1.html
The first part of the URL defines the protocol which we must use to talk to the server, in order to be able to request this resource. When using a browser (as you are currently doing), HTTP (Hyper Text Transport Protocol) is the protocol we use for communicating with web servers. Another example is aim:// which is the protocol for AOL's instant messenger tool. Others are ftp:// (File Transfer Protocol) and mms:// (Microsoft Media Server).
http://www.google.com/webmasters/1.html
The next part of the URL addresses the server on which this resource is located. This is the name that is typically translated to a real IP address.
http://www.google.com/webmasters/1.html
The final part of the URL locates the actual resource on the server. This part is referred to Path to the resource.
To summarize, the URL is built up of three basic components; protocol, server and path, as shown below.
<protocol>://<server>/<path>
To find the URL of a webpage, you can just look at the Address field of your browser. To find the URL of an image, you can right-click on it and select Copy Image Link To Clipboard (may vary between different browsers).
When using URL's inside blog entries, it is best to not show the actual URL address but link to it and label it properly. This will help in both the readability of your blog entry, but also with the search engines that prefer to see properly labelled link and won't see you as a potential link farm. Another common problem is that very long URL's will push out many layouts on various blog layouts and also in peoples RSS readers. URL's can be up to 500 characters in length, and this isn't possible to be viewed in a single line in many of the browsers. Therefore it is best to hide the actual URL from the reader and simply label it. Each of the editors supported, there is a link button you can use, but in HTML you would put:
<a title="Google" href="http://www.google.com/">Google</a>
The attribute title="" is optional, but this helps accessability of your entry for those that may be using text-to-speech tools. It also has the added benefit of popping up a small piece of text when the user hovers over it. For example, move your mouse over this link.
URL's are the cornerstone of the Internet and should be used liberally in and around your entries.