These may already be obvious to most folk, but some tips on keywords and search algorithm I've discovered: 1) keywords are used as exact, all-or-nothing phrases. If one of your keywords is (for example) "Kung Fu Master" a search for "Kung Fu" or "KungFu" won't find that app. Keywords primarily serve to filter apps from search results. 2) search results mix free and pay apps, but the list is not simply sorted with popular (most downloads) listed first - there's a penalty (whose exact value I don't know) that causes pay apps to appear much closer to the top of search results than if search results were ordered strictly based on downloads/popularity. 3) your app title is more important than your keywords with respect to influence on search result order. Two examples: - searching for "rummy" turns up several apps that have the word "rummy" in their title before "Card Shark Solitaire" is listed, despite Card Shark having "rummy" as one of its keywords and being a higher ranked app within Games:Cards. - renaming "Pocket Boxer" to "Pocket Boxing" resulted in it jumping to the 2nd page of search results for "boxing", a significant improvement over when it simply had "boxing" as a keyword.
Great post here, thanks for the important tip stroffolino! I've always been curious about how to format keywords properly.
I actually wrote a fairly extensive blog post on how certain factors affect your app's search ranking. Check it out here.