Great, free, third party tools: Download Firefox Browser and use to check to your web site's compatibility. The download includes Google's Toolbar, which you can use to check the page rank of your web site. Download Opera Browser and use to check to your web site's compatibility. The download includes a tool which shows the accessibility of your web site. Use Google Analytics to get the statistics on your web site: see how many visitors you have had, where they came from, what pages they looked at, etc. Use Google Webmaster tools to check Google's own view of your web site. Webmaster Tools

Compliance

Your web site should follow best practice and be compliant with current standards. The code should be near error free and work with all major browsers. Below are some of the standards your web site should meet.

W3C's HTML Specifications.

The language of your web site is essentially HTML. This stands for Hypertext Markup Language. The W3C has set certain standards for HTML coding.

The code should for your site should be error free, or show just a handful of errors (some web sites having hundreds of errors and this is asking for trouble). If the web site is coded in XHTML then the site should be completely error free. If the HTML code has errors, the site may look fine when viewed in your browser, but different browsers handle errors in different ways, so the site may look completely askew in another browser.

Furthermore, the more errors there are in your code, the more search engines will mark down your site in the rankings, and may even exclude you from their rankings if there are too many errors.

To check the HTML code for your site visit http://validator.w3.org

Different browers display each web site differently. Even different versions of the same browser can display each web site differently. So you should test your web site with all the major browsers to make sure it displays correctly.

It can come as a shock to find that your web site looks great in Internet Explorer, but looks totally distorted in Firefox. Your visitors will be similarly dismayed and you may lose them completely. So it is vital that you check your web site works on all pages with all the major browers.