When you are a website builder, its important to understand how people are using your website. You need to know how many people are on your website; which pages they’re looking at; where they’ve arrived from; and how long they stay. Understanding these will help you improve your website, and add more content that you know your visitors like.

All these questions can be answered by installing Google analytics on your website. Last week we showed you how to set up Google analytics on your website. This time around we’re going to take you through all the basics to help you navigate around the interface.

Have a go and let us know what you find out.

Google has just made available a new version of its search engine. With a project name of Caffeine, the new platform boasts quicker, more relevant and more comprehensive results.

Described as the “next-generation architecture for Google’s web search”, Caffeine has been in development for most of this year.

A Google spokesman has said that this is just the first phase of a process that will “push the envelope” in terms of the search engine’s size, accuracy, comprehensiveness, indexing speed, and (bizarrely) “other dimensions”.

You can test Caffeine yourself and give Google feedback before the full public release.

Google have said that most users won’t notice much difference in the search results. The changes have been made at a deep level within the search architecture, and affect the building blocks on which all the search algorithm is based.

Since Google always lets you know how quick the search has been, if you give it a quick test you will notice that the results come back a few fractions of a second faster. There are also thousands more results that the main search engine.

I for one have never had a problem with the speed of results from Google – there already seems to be a small enough gap after I press ’search’.

All this means that if you have a Search Engine Optimisation programme in place, you will have to take account of a new set of rules. As to what exactly those rules are, we’ll make sure you are kept up to date.

Rather than a reaction to the launch of Bing, Google said it has been working on Caffeine for months. This evolution of Google is designed to keep it one step ahead of any threat from Microsoft, so is unlikely as simply a market reaction to the launch of Microsoft’s Bing.

Check out Caffeine now and let us know if you see anything interesting.

Following last month’s leak of confidential information, we discussed Twitter’s plan for subscriber numbers . Although few of us had heard of Twitter 18 months ago, Twitter hopes to have 100m signed up by the end of 2010.

Well if their latest unique user figures are anything to go by, it seems that they are well on the way to reaching that target. According to ComScore, Twitter’s traffic soared to 51.6m users in July. That’s up a whopping 16% on June’s 7.1m users. And what’s interesting is that almost all these new visitors are coming from outside the US.

The US user base grew from 20m users in June to just 21.2m in July. US users represent 41% of the total site traffic. International users by contrast, which represent the remaining 59% of users, went up by a massive 55% in July. We revealed just a few days ago that London is Twitter’s top city.

There’s no doubt that Twitter’s role in international crises have helped promote it to a more global audience.

These figures could in fact mask a much higher user base. ComScore only count traffic to the website Twitter.com, and not all the traffic from people using Twitter applications, such as TweetDeck and Tweetie. Many millions choose to use the service using apps rather than the website itself.

To further underline the fact that Twitter is not for Teenagers, ComScore also said that just 11% of Twitter users are between 12 and 17.

It seems that our enthusiasm for Twitter know no bounds! And this is helped no doubt by all the free press coverage that the micro blogging service is good at generating.

Is it time you signed up to Twitter too? Or are you sick of reading about it on here?! Leave us a comment below.

Last week the Millward Brown Optimor’s BrandZ Top 100 list was published. This is a list of the world’s biggest brands, and their associated ‘value’.

This year the list is topped for the third year running by Google, whose brand worth has gone up a whopping 16% over the last 12 months. This means that it is now ‘worth’ $100 billion.

As to how this value is calculated, Millward Brown Optimor (MBO) say that it is the sum of all future earnings that brand is forecast to generate, discounted to what that value is today. Some have suggested that a brand’s ‘value’ is arbitrary; for MBO, it’s all about a brand’s ability to ‘generate demand’.

One reason that Google’s brand may be so much higher than its fellow technology companies is that it always calls its products ‘Google’. This contrasts with Microsoft who run many secondary brands such as Hotmail, Windows, and Bing.

Microsoft attracts the second highest valuation, at $76.2bn (up 8 % on last year).

Others in the top 10 include Coca-Cola, IBM, McDonald’s, Apple, China Mobile, General Electric, Vodafone and Marlboro.

The two fastest growing brands were Amazon (up 85 % to $21bn) and Blackberry (up 100% to $16bn).

Despite the economic downturn, the total value of the most valuable brands rose by 2 % to just less than $2 trillion.

So what does ‘brand’ mean?

The word ‘brand’ means many different things to different people. For me, it’s what thoughts and associations people have when they think of your company. Do they think ‘good service, nice people’; or do they think ‘cheap products, fast delivery’. Do these thoughts and associations mean that people will pre-decide to buy from you before buying from your competitor? Apart from your products, ‘brand’ is what your website visitors and customers take away with them, in their minds, having visited your website or bought your products.

So how do you improve your brand’s value?

There are two ways to do this. The first is to make you customers and website visitors have as positive an experience as possible with you, your website, and your products. That might be by having a rich, well designed site; it might be by giving them easy to find information, great service, and a good feeling from their interaction with your website and your business.

The second way is to expose this ‘experience’ to as many people as you can. When it comes to building a website, that means getting as much traffic as possible to your website.

The first obvious was to do this is to work on your Search Engine Optimisation so that you can boost your website up the Search Engine Results page. Secondly, you need to make use of the Social Networking features available within WebEden to start building a community around your website. It’s this community who will recommend your site to others, and ultimately build a loyal base of frequent visitors.

Do any of you have a brand that you think is of value? What value do you think it has? Have you got any brand building tips you could leave for us here? Leave us a comment below.

On the 2nd of July some of the more prolific amongst you will have noticed that WebEden went offline for a few hours. We were subjected to a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. Our servers were attacked from many different hijacked PCs across the Internet all at the same time, which deluged our site with thousands of requests. Our firewalls had a hard time defending from all angles. And this was despite the fact that we had some very beefy firewalls, to defend against just this sort of thing.

Since then we’ve added plenty of extra beef. We’ve re-beefed, you might say.

Well on the 6th of August Twitter proved that its wasn’t above attack either. And it also proved that its Firewalls couldn’t cope. The DdoS attack hobbled Twitter for all its 45 million users, and also took down Facebook and Livejournal too. The difference with this attack is that it has security experts stumped.

“These attacks do not make sense. In the last few years, we have seen the criminals build systems to make money and not get caught,” said Cisco fellow and chief security researcher Patrick Peterson on the BBC dotLife blog.

“Now we see them making a big splash with this attack which is of no benefit. It does not put a single dollar in their pocket and it exposes them to the risk of being caught,” he continued.

What specifically happened in Twitter’s case was that the attack masterminds unleashed a tidal wave of spam email onto the site, which infiltrated it and other sites too.

The first recorded DDoS attack was now over 10 years ago, and big name (and small name!) sites have been defending against them ever since. AOL and Register.com were early victims back in 2001. The most recent incident was the websites of the Iranian government, the focus of foreign activists in opposition to June’s presidential election.

Mr Peterson said to the BBC: “If you go hunting, you want to bag the head of the biggest and fiercest beast to show your strength,”

“So ten years ago, we saw the biggest names on the internet like Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon get attacked because they were the marquee brands of the day. Today, they are going after Twitter and Facebook for the same reason.”

Despite these DDoS ’successes’, this type of attack is now seen as outmoded in the criminal world.

“You have to be brave or stupid to have attacks this brazen with law enforcement being more active in the realm of cybercrime. There is a serious risk of being caught,” said Mr Peterson.

John Harrison from Symantec told CNET.com: “Organised crime and other groups have gone off to other things. It’s more lucrative for them to use the internet, not to take the internet away,”

As to who was behind the attack, there is still some confusion. Some people are vaguely suggesting ‘a Georgian blogger’.

The key to blocking DDoS attacks is to use techniques that can distinguish between PCs that are sending 1000s of site requests per minute, to those who are just going for the ‘normal’ 3 to 4.

However, since the requests are coming in from thousands of worldwide IP addresses, you can’t just block those, since many of those IPs will be of legitimate users.

One thing is clear: Twitter too needs to beef up their security, because there will certainly be more of these attacks. And following last month’s hack of confidential Twitter data, that’s 2 jobs that Twitter’s security team need to get busy with.

“But this is a trend. And I think a lot of people who view DDoS attacks as fun will look at all the media attention and it will invite more criminals to try their hand at it,” warned Mr Peterson.

Did you notice Twitter’s downtime? Were you affected? Leave us a comment below.

Hopefully by now you’ve built a website that you’re at least partially happy with. And if you’ve installed a site counter then you’ll at least know you’re getting some visitors. But where are those visitors coming from? Are they clicking through from another site, or are they coming from Google? And which pages are they looking at on your website? And how long are they staying there?

To answer these and many more questions you need to install Google analytics on your website. Google analytics is one of the best web analytics tools, and best of all its free. Here’s how to set it up on your WebEden website.

How did you get on? What have you found out about your visitors?

We’ve added more tutorials on this series on Google analytics:

Here is a basic guide to Google Analytics

Here is how to segment your data and export reports

Here is how to exclude yourself from your website traffic data.

And if you want to, leave us a comment below.

Evan Williams, co-founder of Twitter, was interviewed on BBC2’s Newsnight last week, and it was packed with interesting Twitter facts.

First of, he confirmed that there were more Twitterers in London than any other city in the world, including hotspots such as San Francisco and New York.

“We have definitely noticed the UK has exploded for us recently. London is our top Twitter using city as of today and the UK is second only to the US in numbers of twitter users,” said Williams.

He was also asked whether Twitter was only good for finding out what celebrities are doing.

“That is not what our data shows. Famous people are certainly popular on twitter, but there is a lot of friend communication that goes on Twitter which is mixed in with news, celebrity, business, you name it.”

As we’ve reported previously, one problem with social media services such as Twitter is that accounts are opened in the name of celebrities, without the endorsement – or even the knowledge – of those celebrities. This means that not only do users end up following fake accounts in the belief that they are in touch with their heroes, but that celebrities are attributed with comments that have nothing to do with them.

Williams said that they were in a process of verifying the accounts of many of its famous users to try and stamp out this process.

“If you look at Demi Moore’s real account, her user name is @mrskutcher, you’ll see a verified account badge. We actually do verify known entities and we go through some manual work to verify them for users so there is less chance of impersonation. In Demi’s case we talked to her personally.

“Demi… and a lot of Hollywood folks have taken to Twitter to connect with fans and have their own voice. It is not mediated through the normal outlets which has been their own representation for years.

“They can speak to people directly and interact with them and I think a lot of people find that very powerful,” he said.

Williams was also asked what impact Twitter was having on journalism. In many cases – such as the Iran election - people inside news events have been able to carry the story of that news event. And journalists themselves are heavy users of Twitter, using it to drive awareness and traffic of their work.

“[Twitter] is not necessarily journalism, certainly in the classic case, but it does enable people to report events as they’re happening. As we just saw in Iran people on the streets [were] reporting what was going on.

“It was news-worthy content people were tweeting, there is a lot of commentary about what is going on, but it doesn’t take the place of journalists of news because you still need analysis and you still need verification of this information, but it adds another layers to the information eco system.”

Its certainly true that we are all still learning how Twitter can help us do what we do, and add extra colour our online experience. For many website builders, Twitter is all about building a community around your website, and driving traffic to that website. The more people who adopt Twitter, the easier we’re going to find out how to do that. Our advice is to get into Twitter now, and try and find out how it can help you and your website. To help you, here’s some links to some Twitter posts we’ve made recently.

Here’s a video tutorial on how to send updates to Twitter from your WebEden website.

Here’s an idea that might make Twitter worthwhile for businesses.

Here’s news about Twitter 101, Twitter’s very own guide on how to use Twitter to market your business.

Here’s a guest blog on how to spot spam on Twitter, and another guide to how to get rid of spam on Twitter.

And finally, here’s a post on how you can (or can’t) measure the success of your Twitter campaign.

Any comments about Twitter, please leave them below.

Just a quick note to let you know that the WebEden website maker will have some scheduled downtime.

We will be carrying out database maintenance which will take approximately 1 hour, at 0730 on the 21st, the 24th and the 26th of August 2009

The work is to routine maintenance on the database which should result in improved overall performance of sites. The changes have been split into three different time slots during our periods of low activity in order to reduce the impact on customers.

In direct contrast to every other social media explosion, it is adults rather than teenagers that are fueling the growth of Twitter.

According to research from Nielsen NetRatings out last week, adults use Twitter twice as much as teenagers do. Just 16% of Twitter users are under 24; a measly 6.6% of teens have a Twitter account.

When you take into account the fact that the under 25s make up a quarter of the active Internet audience, this means Twitter under-indexes in the youth market by as much as 36%.

So whilst Twitter use has exploded in the last 6 months – now being used by around 10% of all Internet users – this growth is despite low adoption rates by younger people.

It seems like its always young people who adopt new a Internet phenomenon, to be followed by the older generation: Facebook followed exactly this model. Some have questioned what it is about Twitter that hasn’t captured young people’s imagination.

“Does it really matter if the kids don’t get it? The fact remains that Twitter has grown to be a major online presence and is being driven forward by significant buzz” said David Martin, VP for primary research at Neilsen.

Such is the level of buzz – as measured by the frequency of mentions on blogs, forums and message boards – that Twitter’s profile is now as great as that of Facebook, despite being just a quarter of the size. This buzz is refueled with every general news ‘event’ such as the Iran election. As to whether this buzz will translate too long term users, only time will tell.

Martin said: “All it takes is one celebrity or major news story to rekindle the Twitter buzz machine, but do these one-off shifts create one-time curiosity seekers or lead to more permanent users?  That’s the unanswered question.”

We’ve certainly picked up here that many Twitter users leave after less than a month.

Maybe all its going to take is a major news story that affects younger people for the Twitter to take hold amoungst the young. Or more likely, faster adoption will be driven by Twitter use by celebrities with a young fan base. It certainly seems like the high profile Twitter users come from a more mature audience – such as Al Gore, Barack Obama, Stephen Fry.

Is Twitter just for older people? If you’re a teenager, have you tried Tweeting? Leave us a comment below.

Last week we had our first guest posting here on the WebEden blog. Its was from Alison Cross, a self confessed non-techie webby. As part of our attempts to get to grips with Twitter, Alison discussed how to spot spam on Twitter.

Well Alison is back, and this time she’s talking about how to slice through - and get rid of - spam on Twitter.

How to Slice Through Spam on Twitter

When Sting warbled: ‘I never saw a miracle of science or progress that didn’t turn from a blessing to a curse’, he could have been singing about Twitter.

The handy little micro-blogging tool has rapidly become a magnet for spammers.

What’s a spammer?  The people who keep trying to make you visit sites that you’re not interested in; the people who want you to watch Britney Spears doing something unmentionable with a courgette.

Although Twitter mount regular pogroms against spammers, there are a few things that you can do to slice your spam.

1. Follow @spam. This is Twitter’s own route for rooting out the spam accounts.  When you follow @spam, any Twitter announcements about spam activities will drop into your timeline, allowing you to take their suggested action.

2. Stop hoovering up thousands of followers via advertised apps to artificially boost your popularity – this is a sure-fire way to voluntarily attach yourself to spammers.

Robert Scoble, self-confessed social media addict, had some 7,000 spammy accounts following him. Read his account here.

3. Vet your potential followers by using one of the many Twitter applications available.  I use Tweetlater (if Ken lets me, I’ll come back to evangelise about it!).  This app allows me to block, ignore, accept and report followers as spam.

4. Watch what you tweet! I call this the Law of Twitter Attraction. Out there are millions of tweeters, some just ready to pounce on you if you tweet their magic word.

For example, if you tweet off a complaint to a friend ‘sick of cash generator spam!’  What happens? Yup, you are suddenly followed by a slew of ‘cash generator’ tweeters.

If you have an automatic follow set up, then their tweets will enter your time line, diluting your product/services message and interfering with your conversations.

To combat this, don’t tweet the proper spelling of the trigger word.  Sticking with the above example, I’ve found that if I don’t type ‘cash’, but ‘c4sh’, that will, for now, keep me beneath the spammers’ radar.

Even better, simply adopt the New Age philosophy and only tweet about things that you WANT in your timeline!

Now that we’re nearly at the end of this guest blog, have a think about my definition of what constitutes a spammer.  No, not the Britney/vegetable people, but ‘people who make you visit a site that you’re not interested in’.

If you are not discerning enough with your Twitter marketing campaign, if you contact uninterested twitterers about your product or service….YOU’RE spam.

About Alison Cross

Alison Cross lives on the Isle of Bute where she has built over a dozen websites using our software. She also helps people use Twitter to market their business. For more info or advice, contact see her website alisoncross4webs.co.uk.