Hi Judd. You wouldn't need the title or description tags for Google's sake (or Bing's sake) on pages behind a login since they couldn't crawl those pages. That said, title tags aren't just used by search engines. That is also the title that shows for the page in the browser window and in the bookmark name (if people bookmark those pages), so it can be worthwhile to add a good title tag to help your visitors. Obviously, beyond the meta description tag, there are other meta tags that you might need (like meta viewport or metra reresh, etc.).

I'd argue there is value in looking at and benchmarking both numbers, though you might not get an accurate picture of both through Google Analytics. You want to know how many sessions ended up in an order, regardless of how many repeat customers there were that converted. As you said, every visit could end up in an order (you could get a little more detailed and segment to clarify just how many sessions qualify) and you want to know just how true that is. At the same time, you want to know how many unique people placed an order as well and repeat order rates.

Here is the tricky part. Google Analytics is pretty good at telling you how many sessions resulted in an order (the conversion rate you see in goal reports is goals per session). With the Time to Purchase report, you can get a fairly decent idea of sessions it took for those higher margin products. Now the other side: unique users. Users is wonky in how it is calculated (for instance one customer uses different browsers/devices or your customer deleted their cookies) so knowing how many users converted won't always give you the number you are after and, in my mind, it isn't reliable enough to benchmark.

What I do to get at the number of unique customers and orders per customer is use other tools (CRM, order system, etc.) to track that number--those systems are designed around people not sessions, so you are going to get a far more accurate picture of how many unique people placed an order. That is your benchmark, but you can map order dates and/or transaction IDs to GA so that you can understand traffic patterns for repeat customers and how they might differ.

Hope that helps.

Really great question and there really isn't any one right answer here. In general, from an SEO perspective, I lean toward one consolidated website that is really well organized. That way all of your SEO efforts benefit one domain. For example, instead of building links to three sites, you can concentrate on building links to one website. Even if the content for patients gets more links (let's say), if everything is on one domain those patient oriented links will still help the content for therapists earn rankings because they'll contribute to overall domain strength.

Along with the SEO though, my other question would be if there is any great harm in having one website serve multiple audiences? There are numerous examples of companies who are able to do exactly that with their content. Doing so requires a strong information architecture to clearly define what each section is, who it is for, how sections are labeled, how you navigate to various sections, etc. Totally doable, and good IA tends to also be good for SEO too. That said, in some cases one audience group might be distracted/offended/annoyed by content that is intended for another audience group or maybe there is just one set of content you'd rather one group not see. Do you have any situations like that? Have you surveyed users for their opinions about the content to identify these pitfalls?

Of course, the other question to ask here is if there is a strong business case for dividing the sites apart? It doesn't sound like it based on your question, but I want to throw that idea out there. I've worked with some organizations where they have one department focused on a certain audience group. To simplify dev and maintenance, the business case is pretty compelling to split the sites apart. Still though, in a lot of cases it is easier to have one website because then all dev, design, branding, etc. budgets (of time and money) can be focused on the one domain vs. divided across multiple domains.

Yep, all of those tactics will be considered black hat and those tactics will not be likely to work. Google can see hidden text and can easily detect those kinds of tactics.

Here is an article more about the hidden text and other black hat techniques. Don't do any of these!
http://www.beanstalk-inc.com/tactics/black-hat.htm

I would say it depends on what the website is and the nature of the links.

Are the multiple links all on the same page or are they on several different pages of the site? Getting links on many different pages of a website would be more beneficial than getting multiple links on the same page.

What about the placement of the link to your website? Is it just a link in the directory or is the link part of a highly relevant blog post? Multiple links inside a relevant blog post can continue to add value if those links go to different pages of your website.

Also, it is worth considering if it is a high authority or low authority website. If it is a high authority site, then multiple links would be worth pursuing. If it is a low authority website, there wouldn't be much value to multiple links from that kind of website.

That is a good point!

On that though, what would the more preferable placements be for a multiple link situation? I would say it would be better to have multiple links in the content area as opposed to multiple links in the footer. Or, do you think a distribution of links would be better...for example, one link in the content and another in the footer?