Google is set to launch a search engine optimisation (SEO) starter guide to help businesses improve their website's performance.

Brandon Falls of Google's search engine team said there is a lot of information available about SEO on the web, but so much so that people who might be new to the area are likely to be intimidated by it.

He added: "We thought it'd be useful to create a compact guide that lists some best practices that teams within Google and external webmasters alike can follow that could improve their sites' crawlability and indexing."

The guide will cover around a dozen common subjects to help people involved with website maintenance improve areas such as site navigation, URL structure, title and description meta tags, anchor text and content creation.

Google has also claimed that it plans to regularly update the guide with new optimisation suggestions in order to keep technical advice current.

Meanwhile, businesses building links to a site for SEO purposes have been advised to check that the sites have not been flagged by Google for distributing malware, in order to ensure their business is not linked to a bad virtual neighbourhood, the search Engine Journal reports.