Google's Matt Cutts Provides SEO Insight for USA Today

USA Today recently interviewed Matt Cutts (SEO guru from Google) on how to improve website search rankings on Google. Cutts boiled down his advice to 5 key factors, giving these recommendations:

1. Spotlight your search term on the page: He says: “Think about what people are going to type in to try and find you.” In other words, focus on your target keywords and make sure you’ve included them on the page.
2. Fill in your “tags”: Matt recommends to focus on two important meta tags: title and description, and mentions that Google doesn’t place much weight on the keyword tag.
3. Get other sites to “link” back to you: Google’s rankings place a lot of importance on the number of other websites that are linking to your site, so try and increase your link popularity.
4. Create a blog and post often: Cutts believes a blog is not only a great way to start a conversation with customers and friends, but also to create content and a great way to add more links.
5. Registration for free tools: Use Google Webmaster Tools to add a sitemap (for example) and learn about your site’s performance. Matt also suggests submitting your site to Google’s Local Business center.

Solid advice if you’re just getting started. Although if this is all news to you, then you have a lot of work cut out for yourself (and your chances don’t look so good, sorry). I would have also added this:

• Create awesome content: The single most important thing you can do for any page of a website is create unique, compelling content that is relevant to your target keywords.