What's the recommended practise for dealing with spaces in your webpage titles ? I currently use "_" to separate words as I find if I try to simply use the space bar then the spaces end up being replaced with the "%" character. Example flights_to_london as opposed to flights%20to%20%london Is there an easier and better way of doing this as I'm worried this might be affecting my SEO performance ?
In page titles? Just use an actual Space. No Dash or underscore. If you are referring to file names/directories, then I would use a hyphen.
Yeah, I guess that makes a difference. If you have a program that will automatically make the URL of your page the title, then hopefully it can also decide what to replace spaces with
(for me) hyphen is the best among the other keyword separators used in URL.. It's neat and clear in site's visitors eyes (as well as the spiders)
I would go with /flights/london/index.html /london/flights/index.html over flights_to_london as opposed to flights%20to%20%london this will have better effect across google, yahoo and msn
The only one that really works is | it is far more effective than the -. I have played with numerous websites trying different things and now use nothing else.
If I use an actual space then the space gets translated into garbage i.e. "flights to london" will become "flights%20to%20london"........which is what I want to avoid. I appreciate the advice but think I may have given a bad example. Let's say the page title is "things to see in London" would you still use "|" to separate each word ??
For page titles I use the "|", now in the example you gave "Things to see in London", then no need to use "|" "-" or "_" but if the page title was "Your Website Name Things to See in London" then the separator can be used like so "Your Website Name | Things to see in London" I must admit I am a little confused, because you say that you will see %20 if you use a space or dash, but that would not be the case in a page title, that would be the case in a URL If we are talking about the characters in the URL, then to solve the problem, just use a "/" at the end of the URL -- this will keep the URL whole such as: http://www.yourwebsite.com/things-to-see-in-london/ or http://www.yourwebsite.com/things_to_see_in_london/
When using a url use the "-" which is accepted by Google as a space for the word. The underscore will be understood in the future.
i think we have things confused you asked : What's the recommended practise for dealing with spaces in your webpage titles ? then we got onto urls "|" i think is just used to replace & in the title not the url i use it as more of a seperator of our main keywords in our page title eg: zippo | zippo lighters | collections if London is your keyword maybe you could try "London | Things to see" then on another page you could use the title "London | Things to do" etc That way London is placed in the first word and this might even help SEO
I agree with them... "-" (dash) would be the best thing to do in terms of your titles... and i use the same thing with mine...
"|" and "-" work best for me, with a slight advantage to "|". I did never recognize any ranking improvements compared to "-", but especially if you have several "|" in your title, it looks a little more "massive" which may increase the click ratio when people see it.