Dashes in key words

Google doesn't seem to handle these consistently

[TonyMc]

How do you handle key words with a dash in it such as L-Widgets? It seems like G is inconsistent with how it treats that type of key word. Sometimes it seems to ignore the dash and sometimes it doesn't. L-Widgets and L Widgets are not consistently different. When I look at the highlighted text in the cached result, sometimes it highlights around the dash and other times it ignores the word completely which seems to indicate that it thinks the two terms are different.

Also, in trying to list both I'm concerned with key word density being too high. What is a good rule on key word density? I've read Bretts steps to a successful site but that density seems high. I see lots of results with the key word being mentioned only once or not at all...at least as far as I've looked. Should I count both versions toward kw density?

Thanks

[sublime1]

Two observations from our site:

1) Google seems to index the full token (L-widgets) and each element (L and widgets) separately, for three index entries, and three match possibilities. The exact match is stronger, but it's not for sure. If there's ambiguity between the version with the dash and without (i.e. lwidgets) you might want to include both variants. Any token that gets indexed would be another keyword.

2) You really have to be pushing the limits of good taste for keyword density to be excessive :-). I spent time worrying about this for a while and after doing some calculations, my conclusions were a) our pages weren't dense enough and b) many other factors matter a lot more, or at least just as much. Brett's excellent guidelines suggest looking at many factors; no single one alone will really help (although there are some that are probably bad enough to hurt on their own if done excessively).

You might want to look around on the Google forum here if this is your focus.