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