Creating valuable content has always been the corner-stone in driving new website visitors to your company site, and with the recent update from Google’s Matt Cutts, it just became even more important.

Matt Cutts stated at SXSW  that a new Google search update is going to be released with the intent to “level the playing field” between sites that are simply optimized via SEO techniques and sites that are creating killer content that makes their site great. More specifically, he was quoted stating:

“Normally we don’t pre-announce changes, but there is something we’ve been working in the last few months and hopefully in the coming weeks we hope to release it. The idea is basically to try to level the playing ground a little bit. So all those people who have been doing, for lack of a better word, over optimization or overly doing their SEO – compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we are trying to level the playing field a bit. We try to make the GoogleBot smarter, try to make our relevance more adaptive, so that if people don’t so SEO we handle that. And we are also looking at the people who abuse it, who put too many keywords on a page, exchange way too many links, or whatever else they are doing to go beyond what you normally expect. We have several engineers on my team working on this right now.”  Listen to the audio clip.

This change will undoubtedly have a huge positive effect on those that have been consistently creating quality content that their customers naturally gravitate towards. Score for me and my sites! And of course, this will negatively affect those who have not been creating content that their customers are interested in. If the latter is you and your company – it’s not too late to get cranking with a company marketing container, AKA a blog. And, there has never been a better time to get started than now!

Take advantage of this inevitable positive change by following these three very basic best practices to getting found in search engines with content:

1. Create educational content that solve questions of prospective customers.

This isn’t content about your products and pricing, but rather information that only an expert would know.

2. Make sure you have added long-tail keywords that are relevant to your industry.

That’s right, content that contains not just any keyword phrase, but a long-tail keyword phrase. These are more descriptive keyword phrases that are usually 3+ more words that describe your content at the very top level. Instead of getting found for “lawyers” try “personal bankruptcy lawyers.” Even more long-tail would be ideal.

3. Killer formatting.

Add in bolding, subheads, numbering, bullets or anything else that breaks your content up into easy-to-consume pieces.

And also, if you’re looking for some blogs to follow to learn from the experts – then I’ve included some of my favorites below.

• TheSalesLion blog
  Fiberglass pools salesman turned inbound marketer because it saved his business. Once a newbie, Marcus, provides great information for newbies in a straightforward manner. I like his realness.
• HubSpot’s blog
  Yes, I work there, but  I truly believe that every single person here is ridiculously passionate and knowledgeable about inbound marketing and helping companies to leverage the Internet to become more successful. They have tons of blog content and marketing offers that will jump-start your blogging efforts.
• Problogger
  Fantastic site to obtain ideas for content, inspiration and even tips on how to improve your overall content strategy.

Creating content has never been more important. If you don’t plan to blog, then how do you plan to drive people to your website?