What is the best URL to use in terms of SEO would something like http://www.example.com/url-query be better for SEO than http://www.example.com/urlquery or are both equal. There is also a web usability perspective here as well which is better for the user?
I believe you should always use hyphen(-) in your page urls when you are joining two keywords. In your query, if you use url-query then you would be able to target all like url, query and url query as a keyword. in case if you use urlquery, you won't be able to target the combination of keywords.
Obviously SEO is a big concern but I also need to think about usability as in how users remember links with hyphens in them and are there accessibility standards relating to URLs?
The seperation of two words by "-" beomes easy by GOOGLE to recognize.Merging the two words may not make your site user aand seracg engine friendly!!!!
Agree. By seperating keywords with hyphens, SE can see that there're 2 or more keywords. By combining them as one word, SE just consider that as one keyword, and it may be not the thing you want.
Agreed with the hypen between words. I've noticed that you have missed the trailing slash off the url. Have you considered adding it or why you haven't added it?
I don't think there's much penalty to joining keywords together without the hyphen. I run a pretty big menswear site that has about 100 key phrases that I target, most of those are made of two or more words that match with the keywords in my URLs and I don't have any hyphens anywhere. While I'm not exactly pulling #1 spots across every phrase just yet, I'm raking pretty well on enough of them not to think there's anything wrong with not using hyphens.
just focus on keyword, as i know "-" mark is not in google concern, so in google perspective url-query it will same with urlquery