Create different pages with keyword variations VS. Add keyword variations in 1 page

[lcourse]

For searches involving keywords like "lessons", "courses", "classes" I see frequently pages in the top rankings which do not contain the search term in the title tag, despite these terms being quite competitive. It seems that when searching for "classes", google detects that pages about "courses" may be just as relevant.

What do you recommend?

option 1: creating 10 pages optimized on 10 different keyword variations, each with a significant part of unique content

or

option 2: one page and dropping throughout the page 10 keyword variations in body and headlines

Given that keywords are all synonyms and website has already high domain authority in the niche.

thanks

[MarcLevy]

Some answers on this before:
http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-many-keywords-max-can-i-optimize-each-page-for

Things you should definitely consider here:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mapping-keywords-to-content-for-maximum-impact-whiteboard-friday

Hope this helps.

[lcourse]

thanks. Marc.

interesting links.

Still my doubt remains. If I have two synonyms which are both very important key terms, would you build 2 seperate optimized pages? I see that google is getting better at recognizing synonyms in some occasions, but still detection does not seem very consistent.