I think one thing you should keep in mind is that 301 is meant for content being moved. In other words moving one page from one site to another, or from one path to another, without changing the content of the page. If you move a page you use 301, google see the change and discount a small portion of the page juice (1%? 5%? no one knows exactly) but pass the vast majority to the same page on the new location.

But... Once upon a time a popular black hat technique was to get control of a page (actually many pages, as many as they could) with a good juice and do a 301 redirect to another page, a target page, to just pass juice.

So... Google, wearing its shining armor, decided to fight back, and changed their algorithm to penalize that, in other words if you do a 301 redirect from one page with a certain content to another page with a totally different content, google notes that, doesn't like it, and penalize the ranking of the target page.

Exactly how much of the two page content should stay the same to pass google antispam rules nobody knows, you can find out running some tests, my guess is probably it's also very specific to the page, domain, authority, etc...

I heard, but I never tested myself, than if you do a 301 redirect from one page on a domain or path, to the same page on a different domain or path, and slowly in the following months you change the content of the target page till it's completely different from the original, Google won't penalize you.

What percentage of page content would be duplicate?

I am asking because I remember seeing a video of our spiritual guide Matt Cutts addressing that, and he said at google they do understand content sometimes is quoted, cited, etc... And it all depends on how much text is duplicated when you quote, cite...

But unfortunately he was not saying how much is too much.

This is just going to disable yoast canonical url, I don't see how could it help passing query string parameters through the user visit path.

https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/api/

You can use either one or another, cookie is persistent through different visits (and last as long as you decide it to last), while the session variable last only for the current user session. Depends on the attribution window you want to use.

According to testing described here: http://moz.com/blog/7-empowering-mozcon-presentations

Some link value is, surprisingly, retained even after the link is removed.

You need coding, when the visitor land on the entry page of your site take the utm_source or utm_campaign from the url and log where he is coming from, in a cookie, session variable, etc... Then pass it through on form submission. You can use header, footer or any wordpress piece of code used in every page.

You can't keep the query string through the visitor path unless you code too, and it's more complex, and I don't believe you can find a wordpress plugin doing that. For sure is not something you can do with a standard wordpress installation.

Maybe I am missing something, but form submission is either PPC or organic because the visitor is coming from PPC or Organic. So if you define a goal in analytics for the form submission, triggered either by url match or javascript, you can later check in analytics how many lead were generated through PPC or organic checking the goals per channel/referral/campaign.

https://www.google.it/webhp?q=google+analytics+goal+form+submission#q=google+analytics+goal+form+submission

Keep in mind you can use utm_source, utm_campaing, etc... In the links originating the leads, if you control them.

I suggest start learning Google Analytics

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1247839?hl=en

https://blog.kissmetrics.com/referral-paths-in-google-analytics/

https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/3297892?hl=en

You can search for blogs/sites with tools like feedly.com and check Domain Authority with opensiteexplorer.org, yes it's a irritating labour intensive manual work.

Keep in mind what works for others doesn't necessarily works for you, I guess you will have to run your own tests. The programmatically wording change worked for me to avoid duplication and improve ranking. I will stay tuned to hear what others have been testing.

I think your approach is wrong. You can't tweak the <title>for ranking and then change it for CTR, first because CTR is a factor in ranking too, maybe a little one, but the general consensus is that it counts; second because if you change it once you rank well tweaking it for CTR you risk of loosing ranking... <title> is one of the most powerful on-page factor... <a href="http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors">http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors</a></p> <p>So I strongly believe you should design it for both CTR and ranking from start.</p> <p>Since <title> is so critical for SEO I think you should test it: <a href="http://moz.com/blog/how-do-i-successfully-run-seo-tests-on-my-website-whiteboard-friday">http://moz.com/blog/how-do-i-successfully-run-seo-tests-on-my-website-whiteboard-friday</a></p> <p>I don't think there's much doubts the keywords you are willing to rank should be there, but you don't know how much is too much unless you test.</p> <p>To make an example your original question was "product name" + "brand name" or "product name" + "free shipping"</p> <p>For that business and for the analysis you already did on keywords how much important is "brand name" as a keyword? And a good ranking of the product page for that keyword is good, or it would be better to focus on different keywords for product page and leave the "brand name" for a brand page or category page?</p> <p>"Free shipping" is considered damn important for a website conversion rate, and have been for a while, so having it on the title could improve your serp CTR as well... But in what position? Maybe better to give your target keyword the best placement (the beginning of the title)... But remember title is chopped (read the link I posted in my previous answer <a href="http://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool">http://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool</a>), which means depending on the lenght of the product name you may have to dynamically change the title wording to accomodate everything you consider relevant.</p> <p>Last thing, looks at zappos and their home, categories, products... The always put the free shipping, but they adapt the title depending on the page.</p> <p>Last last, it's the title of the product pages, you want it to be different for every page, even when product names doesn't differ much, so you need to programmatically change the wording to avoid title duplication.</p> <p>But I am not that much of a SEO expert so take my advices with a grain of salt, and wait for others to support or bash my answer.</p></title>

Which title tags? Product pages? Brand pages? Categories? All of them?

And your doubts about what to put there are related to serp CTR? Ranking?

I think you should keep in mind <title>is very much related to CTR because that's what people will see in a prominent position in serp, so I think you should craft them to be as much related to the search query you are targeting as possible, and of course make it as catchy as possible. Unfortunately I am not aware of any solution to A/B test <title></p> <p>About SEO, as far as I know is one of the strongest asset when it comes to on-page optimization.</p> <p>It's few months old but bet still very much relevant: <a href="http://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool">http://moz.com/blog/new-title-tag-guidelines-preview-tool</a></p></title>