In an interview with US Today magazine, Google’s high profile engineer and blogger Matt Cutt’s has revealed his top 5 tips for ranking higher in Google.

Useful advice but if you’re an SEO pro be prepared to be… underwhelmed. Cutts’ top 5 tips are:

1. Use search terms on your webpages. You want your webpage to rank higher for a given phrase? Make sure it’s actually on the page!
2. Fill in the Title and Description tags with your targeted terms… but give the Keywords tag a miss (Google practically ignores it).
3. Get back links from other sites – back links are given a higher weighting than any of the 100+ data pieces considered by Google’s algorithm when determining a site’s natural search results ranking. (To the search engine marketing firm that continues to mislead its clients into believing that on-page factors are still the most important of all: Google has just spoken.)
4. Launch a blog, post to it, and post often. Blogging allows you to easily create content (more search engine spider food), are more frequently visited by the search engines, and facilitate links back to your website.
5. Register for free tools, such as Google’s webmaster tools. Whether giving you information about who is linking to your site, or how often Google visits your site, such tools will help you attain greater search engine visibility for your site.

Source: Jefferson Graham, “Google’s Cutts: Good directions drive traffic to your website”, USA Today, June 22, 2008

There are more indications that spending on Internet advertising is growing… at the expense of spending on traditional media advertising.

Last year, the top 100 U.S. advertisers in the U.S. - responsible for about 41 percent of total advertising spending in that country - pulled about $1 billion from their TV and newspaper ad budgets and poured it into online advertising.

According to Ad Age, the top 100 advertisers’ 2007 expenditure on TV, print, radio and web advertising was flat, growing just 0.3 percent over the previous year to reach $61.3 billion. However, since online display ad expenditure rose 33 percent to $4.2 billion, a significant chunk of ad spending was transferred from  traditional media to online media.

Meanwhile, prominent search engine marketing firm, SearchIgnite – which has about $350 million in annual billings - says that in the second quarter of 2008 its clients increased their search marketing expenditure by around 10 percent over the previous quarter. The increase in spend was apportioned evenly across each search network - Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live.

Does anyone seriously see this trend reversing? While economic conditions may well temper advertising spending in general, I can’t see anything other than online advertising continuing to erode traditional media advertising.

Perhaps the only ones who are (and should be) doing more offline advertising (and marketing in general) are Internet marketers!

Sources: Erick Schonfeld, “Top 100 Advertisers Shifted $1 Billion To the Web Last Year At The Expense Of TV And Newspapers”, TechCrunch, June 23, 2007, Bradley Johnson, “Top 100’s Ad-Spend Growth Grinds to Halt”, Ad Age, June 23, 2008, Michael Learmonth, “Search Marketer: Search Spending Up 10% In Q2″, Silicon Alley Insider, June 25, 2008