We know SEO, we use white hat techniques that won’t violate Google’s terms of services (TOS) and will help you gain visibility on all major search engines.
Instead of only writing about it and making a huge page trying to convince you, I will show you some graphs of traffic from various sites we worked on, after all “”Those Who Know Don’t Talk, And Those Who Talk Don’t Know”:
If you are interested in our SEO services and want to know more, you can send your questions to us though our contact form and also get a quote:
http://www.code-head.com/contact-us
Hope to hear from you…
What Kind Of SEO We Can Do For You…
1 – Reduce the size of your pages.
2 – Switch to CSS and use proper-modern HTML, modern web pages that use CSS for layout properly, are usually smaller in size and faster to load.
3 – If you have a blog, don’t show 50 posts on your front page, show 10, more posts means slower load times. You can set the number of posts on your blog pages in most modern blogging platforms like Wordpress.
4 – (developers) Turn off output buffering on large pages so that your site responds quickly to requests by Googlebot, with output buffering on, the output will be captured and saved until it’s fully generated before it’s sent back to Googlebot (or user’s browser)
5 – (developers) Turn on output compression, this will crunch some pages upto (or more than) 80% in size.
6 – Use a browser extension like YSlow so you can get more information on your site’s performance.
7 – (developers) Sometimes you code is slow in places where you least expect, (for PHP developers) use http://codingrecipes.com/finding-and-fixing-bottlenecks-slow-parts-in-your-php-code or something similar to get an idea of where the slow parts are so you can fix them.
8 – Get a Google Webmaster Tools account and you will be able to see more information there as well.
Site Speed Is A New Ranking Factor; 8 tips on how to optimize your site
We launched Codehead Web Services a while ago and have introduced 2 APIs so far [A Website Thumnail API and a Search Engine API].
Our goal is to provide some cool functionality that is rather hard to implement through a set of simple web services/APIs so users can create and enhance their own applications.
Here is a full working search engine using the Codehead Search Engine API:
<?php
error_reporting(E_ALL);
/* Save sort order and match mode prefrences in a session variable */
session_start();
/* Set default values for sort, match_mode and search_section */
if (!isset($_SESSION['sort']))
$_SESSION['sort'] = 'relevance_date';
if (!isset($_SESSION['match_mode']))
$_SESSION['match_mode'] = 'any';
if (!isset($_SESSION['search_section']))
$_SESSION['search_section'] = 'articles';
include 'libs/codehead_api/codehead_api.php';
$ch = new Codehead_API();
/* Assume there is a $_GET['q'], @ makes sure PHP won't trow E_NOTICE and if there is no $_GET['q'] then $q will be empty or '' */
$q = trim(@$_GET['q']);
/* $rpp is results per page */
$rpp = 25;
/* $start is where to start the next page; at what item number? 10, 20, 50? This usually comes from a pager */
$start = intval(@$_GET['start']);
/* Whether or not the user want to change sort, match_mode or search section */
if (isset($_GET['sort']))
$_SESSION['sort'] = $_GET['sort'];
if (isset($_GET['match_mode']))
$_SESSION['match_mode'] = $_GET['match_mode'];
if (isset($_GET['search_section']))
$_SESSION['search_section'] = $_GET['search_section'];
?><!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
<title>Search - Powered By Codehead Search API</title>
<style type="text/css">
input { vertical-align: middle; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<!-- The search form -->
<form method="get" action="">
Search For: <input type="text" name="q" value="<?php echo __escape($q); ?>" /> <input type="submit" value=" GO " />
</form>
Search in:
<a href="?q=<?php echo __escape($q); ?>&search_section=articles">Articles</a> -
<a href="?q=<?php echo __escape($q); ?>&search_section=forums">Forums</a> -
<a href="?q=<?php echo __escape($q); ?>&search_section=jobs">Jobs</a> -
<a href="?q=<?php echo __escape($q); ?>&search_section=news">News</a> -
<a href="?q=<?php echo __escape($q); ?>&search_section=blogs">Blogs</a> - It's '<?php echo $_SESSION['search_section']; ?>' right now
<br />
Sort by:
<a href="?q=<?php echo __escape($q); ?>&sort=relevance_date">Relevance Date</a> -
<a href="?q=<?php echo __escape($q); ?>&sort=relevance">Relevance Only</a> -
<a href="?q=<?php echo __escape($q); ?>&sort=date">Date Only</a> - It's '<?php echo $_SESSION['sort']; ?>' right now
<br />
Matching Mode:
<a href="?q=<?php echo __escape($q); ?>&match_mode=any">Any Keyword</a> -
<a href="?q=<?php echo __escape($q); ?>&match_mode=all">All Keywords</a> -
<a href="?q=<?php echo __escape($q); ?>&match_mode=exact">Exact Match</a> - It's '<?php echo $_SESSION['match_mode']; ?>' right now
<br /><br />
<?php
/* If $q is not empty, do the search */
if ($q != '') {
/* Do the actual search, note how simple and painless it is! */
$results = $ch->search->do_search($_SESSION['search_section'], $q, $start, $rpp, $_SESSION['sort'], $_SESSION['match_mode']);
/* Error checking is always necessary! */
if ($ch->has_error) {
echo 'OOPS! there was a temporary error.';
/* If you want to display the internal error, go ahead and do */
} else {
/* All good, loop through and display the results */
// echo '<pre>'; print_r($results); exit;
if ($results['total'] > 0) {
echo "Results $start to " .($start + $rpp) ." out of around {$results['total']} total results; search took {$results['search_time']} second(s)!<br /><br />";
/* Show the previous/next page link */
if ($results['total'] > $rpp && ($start + $rpp) < $results['total'])
echo "<a href=\"?q=$q&start=" .($start + $rpp) ."\">Next $rpp results</a>";
if ($start >= $rpp)
echo " - <a href=\"?q=$q&start=" .($start - $rpp) ."\">Previous $rpp results</a><br /><br />";
else
echo "<br /><br />";
foreach ($results['results'] as $id => $result) {
/* Very rarely, some items might be deleted from the index so this check is necessary */
if (!isset($result['title']))
continue;
?>
<a href="<?php echo __escape($result['url']); ?>"><?php echo __escape($result['title']); ?></a><br />
<small>From: <?php echo __escape($result['source_title']); ?> <?php echo __escape($result['formated_date']); ?></small><br />
<?php echo __escape($result['content']); ?><br />
<?php
/* Codehead Search groups results for news stories */
if (isset($result['grouped'])) {
foreach ($result['grouped'] as $gresult) {
?>
<small><a href="<?php echo __escape($gresult['url']); ?>"><?php echo __escape($gresult['title']); ?></a> - <span style="color: #999999;"><?php echo __escape($gresult['source_title']); ?></span></small><br />
<?php
}
}
echo '<br />';
}
/* Show the previous/next page link */
if ($results['total'] > $rpp && ($start + $rpp) < $results['total'])
echo "<a href=\"?q=$q&start=" .($start + $rpp) ."\">Next $rpp results</a>";
if ($start >= $rpp)
echo " - <a href=\"?q=$q&start=" .($start - $rpp) ."\">Previous $rpp results</a>";
} else {
echo 'Your search didn\'t match any documents.';
}
}
}
?>
</body>
</html>
<?php
function __escape($str) {
return htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES, 'utf-8');
}
?>It’s very easy to understand this code but I’ll try to explain a few things about how it works.
Here is the full documentation of our Search Engine API:
-
Simple Usage
Here is the simplest way of searching our database for the term ‘PHP Sessions’:
<?php
/* Include and instantiate Codehead_API here, if you don't know how, read from the beginning of this documentation */
$results = $ch->search->do_search('articles', 'PHP Sessions');
if (!$ch->has_error) {
if ($results['total'] > 0) {
foreach ($results['results'] as $id => $result) {
/* Very rarely, some items might be deleted from the index so this check is necessary */
if (!isset($result['title']))
continue;
?>
<a href="<?php echo __escape($result['url']); ?>"><?php echo __escape($result['title']); ?></a><br />
<small>From: <?php echo __escape($result['source_title']); ?> <?php echo __escape($result['formated_date']); ?></small><br />
<?php echo __escape($result['content']); ?><br />
<?php
/* Codehead Search groups results for news stories */
if (isset($result['grouped'])) {
foreach ($result['grouped'] as $gresult) {
?>
<small><a href="<?php echo __escape($gresult['url']); ?>"><?php echo __escape($gresult['title']); ?></a> - <span style="color: #999999;"><?php echo __escape($gresult['source_title']); ?></span></small><br />
<?php
}
}
echo '<br />';
}
} else {
echo 'Your search didn\'t match any documents.';
}
}
?>
<br />
The function __escape() is not necessary but we like to escape EVERYTHING before printing, this function is very simple:<br /><br />
<pre lang="php">
<?php
function __escape($str) {
return htmlentities($str, ENT_QUOTES, 'utf-8');
}
?>
-
Methods
There are 6 methods that you can use to retrieve search results:
<?php
array do_search(string $section, string $search_term [, int $offset [, int $results_per_page [, string $sort_mode [, string $match_mode]]]] )
array articles(string $search_term [, int $offset [, int $results_per_page [, string $sort_mode [, string $match_mode]]]] )
array jobs(string $search_term [, int $offset [, int $results_per_page [, string $sort_mode [, string $match_mode]]]] )
array forums(string $search_term [, int $offset [, int $results_per_page [, string $sort_mode [, string $match_mode]]]] )
array blogs(string $search_term [, int $offset [, int $results_per_page [, string $sort_mode [, string $match_mode]]]] )
array news(string $search_term [, int $offset [, int $results_per_page [, string $sort_mode [, string $match_mode]]]] )
?>
Below are detailed descriptions of these arguments and the reply from the server…
-
Search Sections
Codehead Search Engine API has 5 sections for searching:
1 – forums
2 – articles
3 – blogs
4 – news
5 – jobs
You could search these sections directly like:
<?php
$results = $ch->search->jobs('Python');
?>
Or use the generic do_search method like:
<?php
$results = $ch->search->do_search('jobs', 'Java');
?>
!!!Please note that, the default section is ‘articles’ so if you misspell the section or pass in an empty section, the API will respond with all the articles matching your term!!!
-
Offset and Results Per Page (RPP)
The offset is the start offset in which you want the results; if you have a pager and a user clicks on ‘Page 2′ then you must pass in the starting offset of the page 2. The default value for offset is 0 which means starting at the beginning of the result set.
Results per page (RPP) is the number of search results that you want to show on each of your SERP pages. Valid values for RPP are 10 or 25 and the default value is 10.
As an example, suppose you are showing 10 search results per page so the starting offset of your page 3 would be 3 * 10 or 30 so:
<?php
$results = $ch->search->do_search('news', 'bing', 30, 10);
?>
Will display the page 3.
-
Sort Mode
This is the mode in which the Search Engine API will sort your search results and valid values are:
relevance_date
Which will sort your results in order of relevance to the search term and also their freshness, this is our prefered mode.
relevance – Also Default
Will only sort your results based on their relevance to the search term. This is the default value for $sort_mode.
date
Will only sort your results based on date and it’s the least favorite sorting mode.
Examples
<?php
$results = $ch->search->do_search('news', 'bing', 30, 10, 'relevance_date');
/* or */
$results = $ch->search->do_search('news', 'bing', 30, 10, 'relevance');
/* or */
$results = $ch->search->do_search('news', 'bing', 30, 10, 'date');
?>
-
Match Mode
There are 3 matching modes:
any
This will tell the Search Engine API to match any of the keywords in your search term, for example if your search term is ‘SEO Jobs’, the API will return all the documents with either ‘SEO’ or ‘Jobs’ in them and that will include documents with both keywords in them too.
all – Also Default
Will return all the documents with all the keywords in them. This is also the default $match_mode.
exact
This will match all the documents with all the keywords in them but this time it will make sure that the keywords will appear in the exact order in the search term. This is basically phrase match, for example if your search term is ‘PHP Jobs Las Vegas’, the Search Engine API will return all the documents with the exact phrase ‘PHP Jobs Las Vegas’ in them.
Examples
<?php
$results = $ch->search->do_search('news', 'bing', 30, 10, 'relevance_date', 'any');
/* or */
$results = $ch->search->do_search('news', 'bing', 30, 10, 'relevance_date', 'all');
/* or */
$results = $ch->search->do_search('news', 'bing', 30, 10, 'relevance_date', 'exact');
?>
-
All About The Results Array
The return value of any of the above methods is an array that contains the search results along with some data about the search.
The components of this array are:
1 – results – Which is an array containing the search results.
2 – total – Is the total number of matches, this is useful when building pagers.
3 – encoding – Is the encoding of the items in the result.
4 – time_now – The current time of the server in Unix timestamp.
5 – start – The start offset of the results.
6 – rpp – Results per page.
7 – sort – Sort mode.
8 – match_mode – Match mode.
9 – search_time – The time it took to perform the search in milliseconds.
!!!Please note that, each item in the ‘results’ might contain another sub-array named ‘grouped’ which are the results that were similar to that item; this will only be the case when you search the news!!!
The best way to examine the ‘results’ array is to perform a search and then print_r() the results.
<?php
$results = $ch->search->do_search('blogs', 'snow leopard', 30, 10, 'relevance_date', 'any');
print_r($results);
?>
Any problems with the API? You can create a support ticket in your Codehead Webservice Account under Account > Help.
Good Luck 
P.S. Check out the original Codehead Search, our super-fast, custom search engine, where you can scour the best content on the net for computer and web related jobs, forum posts, articles and tutorials, blog posts and news stories all in one place.
Codehead Search Engine API; how to write your own Search Application in ~150 lines of code
A few weeks ago one of our servers started to crash every few days.
After investigating this issue for a while we found 100s of IP addresses from Yahoo! and Inktomi Corporation which is the company who developed Yahoo! Slurp.
So basically Yahoo! was launching DOS attacks against our server although unintentional but very annoying. It also shows that their technology is not as advanced as Google or other search engines or it’s buggy, Whatever you think, crashing people’s servers with your search bot is not cool at all and shows that you have to work on it a little more…
If you have the same problem here is a simple solution Yahoo! suggest; open your robots.txt (create it if you don’t have it and place it in your root folder) and add these lines to it:
User-agent: Slurp
Crawl-delay: 1
Only Yahoo! will understand the line Crawl-delay: X and Yahoo! suggests that you use a small number between 0.5 and 1.
Slowing down Yahoo! Slurp (Yahoo! Search Bot)
I use AdSense on 1 of my websites and a while back I discovered some things about this service from Google.
One thing that I think is awful and shows how big corporates ONLY care about money was that I knew a website that was banned (black listed) by Google because they were “violating Google’s terms of services” by helping people buy and sell text link ads 
and now when I search for the name of the site, it doesn’t show up in normal search results. The messed up part is that this particular website bought AdWords ads and their name shows up in sponsored links section right on the top of the search results.
This means 2 things: 1 – Google doesn’t care much about what you do when you pay, 2 – You can BUY the first spot on Google SERPs!!!
What they could do is to check the URLs against their banned list but…
The other thing about AdSense is this: Have you ever clicked on an AdSense link with confidence? have you ever seen anything valuable in those links?
Many of them are links that take you to irrelevant pages and many of the people who buy these keywords have so much money that they want the traffic in anyway they can, by bidding on keywords that have nothing to do with their pages.
This could be very bad, you are sending your visitors away with AdSense in the first place, but sadly you are sending them to pages that are not good.
It’s unfortunate but it’s what it is for now.
Problems with Google AdSense
You may have noticed that in search result pages (SERPs) of Google, there is a two line description:
Google uses (most of the time) your meta description (if it thinks it’s more relevant) and if your description is too long, it will cut it and show 3 dots at the end:
If you don’t want this ti happen, write a good description that is only 155 characters long, for example, in this case the description fits perfectly:
So when writing a meta description remember: (in no particular order)
1 – Write a meta description that is 155 characters long. (or less, obviously)
2 – Write a meta description that is descriptive.
3 – Write a meta description that is provocative.
4 – Use your primary keyword(s) in it, don’t write a stream of keywords, write something meaningful.
The perfect meta description for your site
Those of you who know me know that one of the client projects I’m working on for many years is Bloggapedia.
It started as a categorized collection of blogs and then became a blogging community.
From the very beginning, I always bugged everyone involved to let me make a search engine out of it and a few months back they finally agreed and told me to go for it. So it took me a while to develop the search part and the blogs are manually approved so there is really no junk.
Right now Bloggapedia is a full text search engine (and it doesn’t use MySQL’s fulltext search either, it was too slow ) and it searches all the blogs in the database at the speed of light and the quality of the result is great!
Now, there is another famous blog search engine called Icerocket. Icerocket has so much reputation and it’s name is everywhere BUT I don’t understand why?
For example take a look at the search result for the term “Sushi” on Icerocket:
http://www.icerocket.com/search?tab=blog&fr=h&q=sushi
Now, compare this with Bloggapedia:
http://www.bloggapedia.com/blog_search.php?q=Sushi&=posts
Do you see the difference?
And hey if you are from Icerocket, I can fix this for you
Comparing 2 blog search engines
One of my clients was buying Stumble traffic and as soon as he stopped doing it, Alexa rank for his site dropped by 1000s.
We think this is because users with Stumble toolbar tend to have Alexa toolbar too. (and probably other toolbars)
Toolbar Junkies
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Author Bio
Hamid Alipour is a partner in Codehead, LLP with his wife, Tess. Hamid speaks 12 markup and programming languages [Yes, 12: PHP, CSS, Ajax, JavaScript, HTML/XHTML, Java, Python, C/C++, ASP, Visual Basic, Scheme and Action Script]; has a penchant for solving the unsolvable; an affinity for clean, hand-written code and is a Zend Certified 
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