Choosing The Right Keywords For Your App
We all know how important keywords are on the internet and Amazon have published a new article to their Amazon Appstore Developer Blog, to help you ensure you understand the process.
Keywords are not visible to customers in the Amazon Appstore, instead they are used (in addition to the content in your detail page and the name of your app), by Amazon’s search engine to match products with search phrases on Amazon.com. Keywords can be a maximum of 500 characters per app submission and they must be relevant to the app they’re associated with. Keywords should be separated by a comma and you can submit multiple keywords with your app submission. Finally, keywords should help match the features, applied uses, and the primary audience for the App.
Do include
• Keywords specific to your app
• If there is an acronym of a keyword, put both the acronym and the full word as follows: “service oriented architecture,” “SOA app”
• Number of players as follows: “multi-player game” or “2-player game” or “single-player and multi-player”
Examples of keywords for a hypothetical finance app
Expense Tracking, Currency Conversion, Expense Report, VAT, Calculator, Business, Travel, Spreadsheet Exportt.
Example keywords for other apps
• MP3 or music app: ID3 Tagging, ID3 Tag Lookup, Look-up, Collection Sorting, Library Organize
• Syllable counter: creative writing, Poetry, haiku, sonnet, iambic pentameter
• Sound editor: Sample Recorder, Pitch Bending, Podcast, soundboard
• Wind calculator: Golf, Golfing, Sailing, Boating, Hunting, windage, wind chill
Do not include
• “Free” or “Free app” – even if your app is always free, please do not use this term / phrase
• App title – this will be picked up organically from your detail page
• App category – this will be picked up organically from your detail page
• Vendor or developer name – this will be picked up organically from your detail page
• Other app names in your keywords (e.g. “Angry Birds” if your app is really “Amazon MP3”)
• Trademarks or other Intellectual Property you do not have rights to
• Vague keywords that aren’t relevant to your app
• All caps, exclamation marks, question marks and other symbols
Using a music app as an example, here are examples of keywords that are too vague to help the search-ability of the app:
• MP3
• Classical
• The National
• Really Cool App! Really Cool App!!
Keywords can be updated when you are releasing a new version of an app, but not for an existing, published version.
Joanne Carter
Joanne Carter is a British photographer, photography journalist, editor and curator and the founder and editorial director of TheAppWhisperer.com, an independent international photography publication established in 2009.Her journalism, criticism and commentary have appeared in The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Financial Times, BBC, Vogue Italia, LensCulture, Popular Photography, Android Magazine, NikonPro, DPReview, Which Digital Camera and Which Camera. She has lectured internationally on photography and mobile art, served as a juror for international photography awards, and exhibited her own photographic work across the UK, Europe, South Korea and the United States.Alongside her editorial work, Joanne's photographic and postgraduate research explores death, grief, memory, representation and social inequality through contemporary photography, participatory practice and visual research methods, with the longer-term aim of developing this work through doctoral research.Through TheAppWhisperer, she continues to publish independent photography journalism spanning contemporary photographic practice, mobile imaging, photographic apps, computational photography and emerging imaging technologies.Joanne is available for editorial commissions, photography projects, judging, curatorial work, speaking engagements, consultancy and selected collaborations.
