Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.
W.E Jonk: Those things are more a call to action thing. And if a form works for you then it does. But there are other ways to. Like an AJAX form right on the home page.
Basically what you want to do is to create a form with a high conversion rate. So you can test one form against another and track it with GA for example.
This is a nice example of a script with jQuery where you can track which inputs where filled in. With that you can see where people are too "bored" to fill in the rest. :D
(Link above).