I want to send people to the homepage of a site. But I want to track how many visits from a particular link.
Will Google analytics track the number of visits to a page if that page uses a 301 redirect to another page?

yes, if you redirect with html or javascipt (not 0 second redirection)
no, if you redirect with .htaccess or php

The only way I know how to do 301 redirects is through .htaccess file and mod_rewrite module.

There's a way to redirect through html?
I wouldn't want to do it in javascript, because what if by chance they don't have javascript enabled (some people don't believe it or not).

But I would be interested to see how to redirect with html???