To reduce the effects of misleading meta tagging and indexing techniques used by many unscrupulous web designers, search engine programmers have begun to develop algorithms that give higher relevance to information that can be obtained from a source other than from your web site directly. Alta Vista is the first major search engine to begin to employ the use of off-site information in their ranking algorithms. Though its actual algorithms are tightly guarded, the use of link analysis appears to be in use in the search engine's determination of site relevance.

So, what is Link analysis? It is the accumulation and evaluation of information about a site in regards to Link Density, Link Popularity and Cross Linking. Let's look at each of these in more detail.

Link Density

Link density refers to how many other sites link to your site. You can determine your link density with a reverse link lookup. A reverse link lookup tells how many websites, other than your own, are linked to your site. To perform a reverse link lookup in Alta Vista, enter a simple query like:

+link:www.hotmail.com -host:www.hotmail.com

The query will return the number of sites that are linked to Hotmail's website.

Link Popularity

Link density alone is not enough for a search engine to make a valid assesment of a website's topic relevancy. Link popularity is another piece of off-page information that is considered. These algorithms analyze link popularity using third-level linking in determining a site's popularity. Basically, the algorithm looks at what sites link to the sites that link to your site.

For link popularity algorithms, it's the quality of links, not just the quantity of links, that counts. When you are considering what sites to approach about reciprocal linking, you should consider a link from sites with their own domains over a site hosted on a free web host like Tripod, Angelfire and Hypermart.

Cross Linking

Sites geared toward a specific subject generally have a higher density of cross linking to other sites that are relevant to the same subject. This is where the concept of the Internet as a web originates. High-density cross linking indicates a topic grouping and sites in such groupings are deemed to be highly relevant to that grouping's topic.

Take the search keyword phrase nuclear energy. The first site listed in Alta Vista is the Nuclear Energy Agency. If you do a reverse link lookup on the NEA and then take the sites from that lookup and do reverse link lookups on them, you'll see the same sites, over and over again. These sites would have high relevancy to a "nuclear energy" query made on a search engine that factors in cross linking and groupings.

What Should You Do?

• Continue to ensure that your title tag is eye-catching and appropriate.
• Continue to make sure that your description tag is accurate and that it uses your main keywords.
• Continue to research and maintain your keyword tags.
• Continue to use your keywords early and often in your website page copy.

And, if you haven't already done so, start to:

• Trade links with other websites that focus on the same topic as yours.
• Identify and get listed in topic-specific portals.
• Use reverse link lookups to track not only your popularity, but also the popularity of the sites you trade links with.