I am actually very surprised that no one wants to talk about Keywords. Keywords are your best friend, they actually might be your only friend. Keywords can be your biggest enemy as well. ( as I found out today Everything I submitted got rejected because of misuse of Keywords ) I think it is time for developers on this forum to knock their heads together and share any insights they might have regarding " Keywords". I will start.... Don't use other competitors app names. It seems to be a death sentence for any submitted app. You will be forced to go to the back of the line. I had my wings clipped really badly today. I don't want any of you guys to experience the same thing. I used the word Sudoku for the keywords of Str8ts and didn't have a problem. But when I search Sudoku, Str8ts is no where to be found. So I wasted 7 (including comma) of my precious 100 allowable spaces (letters). So search if your Keywords are effective or not. Make sure you make the 100 letters count. Don't go out and buy a convertible Mercedes just yet! When you search a category ( Keyword ) and your apps are pasted all over the front page of your search I am thinking the search mechanism is memorizing previously visited apps and placing them front and centre. We are all guilty of looking at our own apps way too often, pushing them on the front pages of our "Keyword" searches.( would really like some confirmation on this please) This is my contribution to the subject .......... Keywords are here to stay! We need to understand them quickly. The best way we can understand them and use them to our advantage is sharing discoveries. Jeff
Dave, I read the guidelines as well I am more interested in the hands on experiences people are discovering in real time. Especially with the new store format.
Syndicated Puzzles, are you sure you put "sudoku" for Str8ts ? that's odd, because i can not find it, i just start Itunes, type sudoku, and Str8ts is nowhere to be found ?? looks like keyword is one of the new problem for AppStore now
Exactly I wasted 7 of my 100 spaces. The search results only Sudoku apps. Which is a good thing in my opinion even though we are trying to promote Str8ts as the "Next Sudoku". This is really good for the people actually trying to sell Sudoku.
pretty soon all keywords will start blending together. There is only so much you can say with 100 characters. Let's take our game Underworlds. If its keywords are: RPG,Dungeon,Dragon,Role Play,etc there is little to differentiate ourselves from the hundreds or thousands of other apps with similar keywords. Do we try to separate ourselves by coming up with some clever variation of a keyword? Then we are depending on the end-user to be clever and know exactly what we want. Underworlds has been compared to other games on different platforms like Neverwinter Nights and a few Blizzard games. Opps, we can't use those words as keywords or our app will be rejected. So someone who comes to the store and is looking for a Diablo like game and types in 'Diablo' will miss Underworlds completely. Since the sort is further sorted via sales, it will pretty quickly ice out the small guy. What is going to happen with the current system is it will be divided into the super big guys, EA, Gameloft, etc and the occasional super small (a guy in a basement who makes a fart app). If you look at the console or PC market this is exactly how it is now. To make the keyword system work a few things need to happen. 1. Remove all restrictions on what a keyword can be, These are hidden from users so what does it matter what they are? Google doesn't regulate what a meta tag on a web page is and the internet seems to be working fine. 2. with #1, there is no need to manually review keywords. With the super small submission review teams it seems absolutely nuts for keywords (once again HIDDEN for users) to be reviewed. /rant over
One Eye, I think your comment about the the keywords blending together might not be the case anymore. For example my game Domino Dice is really in pretty good company when you attempt a " Dice" search. Most of the games listed are Dice games. The same when you search Sudoku. All Sudoku! So I am not sure but I think the Keywords are being checked if they are actually suitable. I am going out on a limb here. So in your case if you search "dragon" the majority of the apps should be dragon related. It really seems to help if you have the search word directly in the title of the app. Some unrelated searches show up company names with Dragon in the name etc. But it looks generally speaking a lot less cluttered now.
