Whether to target keywords from home or from internal pages?

[jbullet]

When deciding from which page to target keywords, how does everyone decide which page to target these keywords from when you have, say five keywords that you want to target? Do you try to target as many keywords from the home page as you can (whilst staying below the maximum Google display from the page title) or keep it minimal and create many internal pages?

Do you think it's better to target from the home page as this generally gets the most natural links or an internal page which you can specifically optimise around 1 or 2 keywords?

For example, if you wanted to target five keywords e.g.

Red shoes
Red sneakers
Blue shoes
Blue boots
Green Shoes

Would you target all of these from the home page or target the most important from the home page and others from an internal page?

I've worked on a website in the past on which I had optimised the home page and an internal page for the same keyword and Google kept changing the page it was indexing for this particular keyword! Anyone know why this was?

Also, I've optimised two pages for the same keyword and had positions one and two from it!

[Robert Charlton]

I'd get more specific lower down in my navigation structure and keep the more general, more competitive targets up at the top. This usually ends up being shorter phrases targeted by home and longer, more specific phrases on inner pages. There's a natural category-subcategory structure inherent in this kind of arrangement as well.

[jbullet]

Thanks for your reply, Robert. What if the sites on page one are based around a specific topic? For example, if there is a site called redshoes.co.uk. Do you think they would have an advantage?

What do you think of the tactic of looking at the number of sites on page one which have an internal page ranking. Do you think that's a good way to assess this?