Hyphenated Words as Keywords what is spam?

[donford]

Do you know of any evidence that explains how Google or any SE would handle pages with words that are commonly hyphenate?

Our site for example has a large O-ring section.

A couple years ago when we did our SEO we used Google's keyword tool and found that these words all have different Cost Per Click, Global / Local searches.

O-Rings
O-Ring
oring
o-ring

So we assumed they were each unique keywords and designed our pages to alternate usage of the terms as they are fairly interchangeable.

However we have not achieved the position we would have expected from all that work, now while I'm doing another SEO pass with the tools here.. I want to make sure we don't spam them, but still cover all our bases.

Thanks for any tips, advice or links.

[EGOL]

If you go to google and do searches for these variations you will quickly see how optimized pages are treated in the SERPs.

It varies.

[donford]

Thanks for the Response Michael,

I should have type

O-Rings
O-Ring
orings
oring

A plural and non-hyphenated version of each.

We did make some changes in this pass that shown duplicate keywords, however we always tried to keep our higher up pages broad, then focus the keywords on specific pages.

My main concern was with spam. I don't want to say o-rings & orings if they are actually the same word and could get us into trouble for spam.

Thanks again

[MichaelWeisbaum]

Initially I can see that you have two of the same keyword listed.  "O-Ring" and "o-ring" are the same keyword since Google's Keyword tool doesn't differentiate between Capitalized and lower-case.  If you optimized four different pages for these keywords, it's likely that you didn't achieve the rankings you desired for the keyword I mentioned because you cannibalized it with two pages.  If two pages are heavily optimized for the same keyword, Google can't distinguish which one should rank for the term, so it tends to get held back in rankings.

As for the hyphens, I would only optimize for the keyword that has it in it and especially the correct spelling of it.  Google's autocomplete and suggestions have started to reduce the amount of searches for misspelled keywords.  It would be in your best interest to optimize grammatically (imo).  I think you'll see that it's going to help you out in the long run.