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, creator of the world’s most popular mobile photography and art website— TheAppWhisperer.com— TheAppWhisperer platform has been a pivotal cyberspace for mobile artists of all abilities to learn about, to explore, to celebrate and to share mobile artworks. Joanne’s compassion, inclusivity, and humility are hallmarks in all that she does, and is particularly evident in the platform she has built. In her words, “We all have the potential to remove ourselves from the centre of any circle and to expand a sphere of compassion outward; to include everyone interested in mobile art, ensuring every artist is within reach”, she has said. Promotion of mobile artists and the art form as a primary medium in today’s art world, has become her life’s focus. She has presented lectures bolstering mobile artists and their art from as far away as the Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea to closer to her home in the UK at Focus on Imaging. Her experience as a jurist for mobile art competitions includes: Portugal, Canada, US, S Korea, UK and Italy. And her travels pioneering the breadth of mobile art includes key events in: Frankfurt, Naples, Amalfi Coast, Paris, Brazil, London. Pioneering the world’s first mobile art online gallery - TheAppWhispererPrintSales.com has extended her reach even further, shipping from London, UK to clients in the US, Europe and The Far East to a global group of collectors looking for exclusive art to hang in their homes and offices. The online gallery specialises in prints for discerning collectors of unique, previously unseen signed limited edition art. Her journey towards becoming The App Whisperer, includes (but is not limited to) working for a paparazzi photo agency for several years and as a deputy editor for a photo print magazine. Her own freelance photographic journalistic work is also widely acclaimed. She has been published extensively both within the UK and the US in national and international titles. These include The Times, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, Popular Photography & Imaging, dpreview, NikonPro, Which? and more recently with the BBC as a Contributor, Columnist at Vogue Italia and Contributing Editor at LensCulture. Her professional photography has also been widely exhibited throughout Europe, including Italy, Portugal and the UK. She is currently writing several books, all related to mobile art and is always open to requests for new commissions for either writing or photography projects or a combination of both. Please contact her at: [email protected]
