I have a photo script the create SEO friendly urls based on the photos name but if its a person say "Joe Bloggs" it creates a url like domain.com/joe%20bloggs.html Is it ok to have the %20 bit in the middle or is there a simple work around i am missing, i have tried using an underscore _ but as the name is also included on the page as well as the URL it looks odd so i went back to using a space %20 Any idea what i can do from a SEO point of view?
From SEO point of view, it shouldn't be a problem. I have a few sites with %20 (space), SEs read it fine, but I found that people tend to get confused a bit when reading the SERPs. After A/B split testing I found - more effecting then %20. A much higher CTR happened with - (at least 50%+/-, can't remember the exact figure).
Try replacing spaces with hyphens (-). It looks much cleaner to humans, and the search engines treat it as a [key]word delimiter.