Best methods to make urls friendly?

Question

We're working on revising the url structure for some of our movie content, but we aren't quite sure on the best way to handle odd characters. For example,

'303/302'
'8 1/2 Women'
'Dude, Where's My Car?'
'9-1/2 Weeks'

So far, we're thinking:

/movies/303-302
/movies/8-1-2-women
/movies/dude-wheres-my-car
/movies/9-1-2-weeks

Is this the best solution? Is there anything we're forgetting?

Answer 1

We always use dashes.

I don't have a source off hand, but I have heard that the dash character is good for SEO purposes, better so than something like camel caps (i.e. dudeWheresMyCar) but not sure how it compares to underscores, ampersands, or percentage signs. Apparently with dashes (and maybe other separation characters too) search bots can "read" the links and add it as just one more factor on determining content relevance.

Answer 2

Use this format: /movies/123456/8-1-2-women

Set up your web server so that movies are identified by the numeric id (123456), and the rest of the path is ignored (only serves for SEO).

(Stackoverflow uses this approach)

Answer 3

From Seomoz: "When creating URLs with multiple words in the format of a phrase, hyphens are best to separate the terms (e.g. /brands/dolce-and-gabbana/), followed (in order) by, underscores (_), pluses (+) and nothing."

This has been confirmed by Matt Cutts, Google too.