Let me explain a little more here. When someone goes to your page they want a questions answered, what we call their "query". If they are looking for kosher hotdogs then your page needs to be exclusively about kosher hotdogs. (not sausage, hamburgers, metz or brauts....kosher hotdogs) Sure, it can have links to mustard, ketchup or places to get hotdogs but the user intent for this query is to find something about kosher hotdogs. Your job as a website is to answer that query.
With that being said, yes, I try to make each page we create exclusive for one keyword. For instance, let's say you are a dentist office and you want to rank for the keyword phrase "Dental implants". The entire page needs to be SEO'd for the phrase "dental implants".
Step by Step: (I don't work with any dentist, and never have, but this is what I would do)
Try really hard to have the URL have the keyword in it. For example: www.mylocaldentist.com/dental-implants
Let's go ahead and set up rel=canonical to make sure we don't create duplicate content on accident.
Use the keyword in your Title tag and
tag near the beginning of them (I generally keep these two texts the same depending on how your site is built.) Title Tag <title>Dental Implants</title>
Dental Implants
(Don't think they need to be the same or different. I personally believe they can be the same and rank well. You'll get different opinions on this but from my experience they can be the same)
Now write great content....actually don't write content....talk to me.....Show me that you know all about dental implants and the benefits, pros and cons, ways your company can help me get them if I decide to get them and how to get more information.
Now that you have your "content" lets do a little SEO...
Your keyword will naturally be in the "content" but lets go to the all the incidents it is used and bold it by using dental implants
I like to link to an off-page authority (as well as internal pages that are helpful, ie. Contact Us, Locations, financing, etc) to help with my rankings. For example, you could say that "we use the finest dental implants from 3m, Anew, etc" and have the link point to the ADA site like I did.
Add a photo of dental implants (that your company has taken) and add the title and alt tag as "Dental Implants"
Let's make sure that the our Meta description has the keyword in it (not actually an SEO thing but when someone searches it in Google you want them to see it in your Meta Description)
After you have done this then run your on-page report from SEOmoz to make sure that everything looks good.......
That was lengthy but I think that everything on a given page should be to answer a given query. That simple!
Darin.
I am adding this part below because I just realized you asked a question about two separate keywords "cheap red paint" and "red paint"
I would look up the two keywords and use [red paint] and [cheap red paint] (that is exact match) and you'll find that one is much better than the other. (I know this is just an example but one has 880 searches vs. <10) If for instance both did have pretty good results, I would use the more searched one as my keyword and link to it both ways but optimize for your main keyword first and rank it. For example. If you use www.paintstore.com/red-paint and I would do a link campaign to link to the page as "red paint" (mix it up though. don't get hit by penguin!) I wouldn't start worrying about "cheap red paint" until I started ranking for "red paint". Once you start ranking for "red paint" you can start to add to that document a few instances of "cheap red paint" and link to the page that way. Basically what I am saying is that you don't need two pages for these keywords because they are variants of one another. Until you have good domain authority, stick to one keyword and focus in on it per page.
Hope this helps. Sorry it was so long. If you have any questions feel free to ask.