A Hooky Title
Your title is like the hook — not of a fishing line, but more like of a great song. It should implant itself in a reader’s brain like the opening riff of Roxette’s She’s Got The Look. Yeah, I’m old. Anyway, the best way to make a title is quite literally to make two hundred potential titles and then have someone else in your industry pick the best one.

A Description Of Your Product or Service
The description should be short and to the point. The upstart Dollar Shave Club says it in just nine words: “A great shave for a few bucks a month.” If you can describe your offering that succinctly, you’re doing well.

A Demonstration Of Your Product or Service
Usually in the form of a video, or maybe a slideshow if you’re old school, it’s absolutely critical that your landing page shows your audience what your product is and does.

A List of Benefits
Consumers are picky, finicky, critical, and mean — but they’re not all that smart. If you don’t tell them in really obvious words how your product or service makes their lives better, they won’t get it, and if they don’t get it, they won’t get it.

A Really Obvious Call To Action
Whatever it is that you want your surfers to do next to move closer to becoming a customer, make it as blatant as you can. Giant orange arrows that say “click here” or “enter your ZIP code” or whatever you’re asking for are ubiquitous because they’re good.

That’s it — make your landing page someplace that’s good for people to land, and you’re golden.

Ranking Checker by SEOmoz
For no cost, you can check your rankings for up to five keywords per day, and it keeps an excellent little log for you of how your keywords rank day after day — a log that you can download as a CSV file if you need. A dedicated SEOer can check about 150 keywords per month with this tool, provided you can deal with your updates being that rare.

MultiRankChecker by iWebtool.com
Sometimes, you just dont’ want to manually check the PR and Alexa rankings for your client and their seven major competitors all at once. Enter MultiRankChecker and you’ll get results in seconds.

Fiddler by Fiddlertool.com
Fiddler requires the .NET framework for Windows, so not everyone will be able to use it — but for those who can, it’s grand. Fiddler allows you to analyze all of the background communication that happens between a browser and the servers. It’s excellent for debugging a webpage that isn’t doing what you want it to in all of the browsers you want to do it in.

SEO Analyzer by Sitening.com
SEO Analyzer gives you a report that shows a detailed list of SEO components and how the assessed website stacks up to them. It’s not any substitute for a professional SEO assessment, but it’s a great tool for making sure that your website has the basics covered before you turn it over to the experts.

Backlink Checker by WeBuildPages.com
This is probably the best free backlink checker on the Web today, it’s simply a useful way to keep track of your backlinks, or, more importantly, analyze a competitor’s backlinks and see where they’re getting their juice from.

Are there more? Of course — probably hundreds of great free tools — but these are the ones that our SEO experts use on a daily basis. Try them out and see for yourself!