Can Google bots interpret hyphen separated words as a single keyword?

Question

I have a french website which frequently includes the word rendez-vous. But, Google Webmaster Tools content keywords tells me the #1 keyword is rendez which is not what I want. Even worse, the word vous is not even listed as a keyword (probably ignored). I do have the required meta (keywords/description).

I know the science of indexing is very complex, but is there something I can do so the content of my pages generate the proper keyword list? i.e. can a hyphen separated word become a single keyword.

I believe (for now) I have 2 options:

1. Leave it like that :(
2. Modify my URL to include rendez-vous to help the indexing

Answer 1

Google seems to treat keyword with hyphen as pretty much the same as keyword without hyphen. In your case, Google considers rendez-vous as rendez vous and thus as rendez and vous as separate keywords.

But it's not a big deal; you're not losing traffic. Your website may show up on Google with all variant of keywords above.

It's like for keywords on URL: from a Matt Cutts blog post (from 2005 sorry):

If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2″.

That's why I suggest you to keep your URL like that, especially if you mainly use on your website the combination rendez-vous as keyword, Google can understand rendez-vous as a keyword on its own.