There is a fine line in the difference between site relevance and site popularity. Many webmasters are on a never-ending quest to achieve that perfect balance of relevance and popularity. However, what many of them do not know is that by the continual addition of fresh relevant content to their website, they can actually build popularity with every incoming link to their content.

Without a doubt, content is king. However, the drive for both site popularity and site relevance can sometimes be a catch twenty-two.

The science of the search engines can be traced back to the middle of the 20th century when the programming methods of storage and retrieval of data on computers systems used in by the government and universities were continually being improved to allow researchers the ability to quickly gather the data that was needed for their specific requests. From this system the term information retrieval (IR) was coined. Scientists soon discovered that data could be returned based on two factors: relevance and popularity.

Relevance is given to the quality or degree of content in the document that matches a user\'s request. The calculation of relevance rises as the user\'s query shows up multiple times within the document, or as a title, heading or subheading.

Popularity is given to a particular document that is used as a supporting reference in one or more documents that would match a search query.

This element of information retrieval (IR) was used in the basic stepping-stones of the internet for the retrieval of websites and information on the search engines. Through time, each of the major search engines have developed their own algorithms to further refine the data that is retuned for a search query.

This powerful tie between relevant and popular content can be the difference in achieving prominent ranking or no ranking at all. Still, many webmasters overlook the actual importance of using this method to their advantage.

The science of information retrieval actually proves that by creating a continual stream of fresh relevant content on your website, and getting the content indexed by the search engines, other websites will link to your pages and build both your PR and popularity at the same time!

Every site owner and Webmaster wants a steady stream of traffic to their website, but many of the commonly used tools or techniques either cost too much money to take to long to implement to be truly effective. You don\'t need a lot of money or expensive scripts to help you drive more visitors to your site. Instead, you need to balance relevance with popularity.