Paid submission...a rip off?

I receive a whole host of search engine related emails and feeds and a common recurring theme from one of them is the old 'Get listed in 48 hours, GUARANTEED'. I've never believed in paid submission to search engines - if you optimise your site properly, you don't need to.

There are some tips & techniques that you can use to get your site into search engines quickly which I'll post on soon. One of them that I've used is to add your site's feed to your personal MSN or Yahoo! page. Effectively, you're telling these search engines about your site...and a short while after adding your feed, you'll start to show up in their results pages. That, coupled with adding a Google sitemap should have you well on the way to being indexed.

What techniques do you use to get listed quickly? Have you ever used a paid submission service? And has it been worth the cash? Leave a comment and let me know.

Nice API - Yahoo! term extraction

Tag clouds abound these days - and are, I think, a nice way for users to discover deeply embedded content within a site. Useful tag clouds are built on the idea of extracting useful keywords from content. So how do you go about doing that without extracting all the noise - after all, the word ‘the’ probably appears frequently in your content, but you sure don’t want to display that in your tag cloud.

One nice way might be to use the Yahoo! term extraction API. In short, bung it some content and it’ll return you a list of relevant / related tags. It uses the Yahoo! search technology and will filter out all the chaff for you. So you could, for example, display a post on a forum and use this API to provide the user with a list of significant and related keywords to search (eg) blogs, technorati or wherever.

Further reading can be found here and here with the official documentation in the Yahoo! developer network.