Can search engines detect words between spans?

[BigDogUK]

Hi all, I'm designing a site and obviously I want it to be optimised for search engines. It's going to be XHTML and CSS valid.

One feature of the design is that some words start with a blue letter so I've enclosed the first letter within a span class called blue and then continued the word (example below):

<span class="blue">a</span>dsense <span class="blue">k</span>eywords

The thing is, these are some of my keywords. Will Google, Yahoo, MSN still pick the words 'adsense keywords' up in this example.

If not, is there a better more SEO way to do it?

Thanks

[tedster]

From what I've seen in the page abstracts on search results, there tend to be some hiccups -- adding in a spurious blank and so on. So I avoid this kind of mark-up on important words. The css pseudo-element :first-letter [w3schools.com] is probably a better approach.