Confusion regarding SEO friendly PHP links

Question

Is SEO affected by the type of titles PHP generates?

Eg: CamelCased link (not easy to read) http://website.com/HelloWorld.php
or
Link with hypen (easy readable) http://website.com/hello-world.php

What's your opinion on this? Which rules are to be followed to keep my webpages search engine friendly?

Answer 1

If you want to achieve this by .htaccess I suggest using this:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . index.php [NC,L]

Which drops the .php and allows for more SEO-friendly URLs e.g. http://website.com/2012/02/04/name-of-the-article. Inside the index.php catch the URI with $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] and include the file you want.

Answer 2

The - is a word separator. In Hello-World, google recognises the words, hello and world. HelloWorld will be understood as one word, and will not contribute to the term hello world. Also important, the underscore character (_), is not a word separator, so Hello_World will not be recognised as hello world.