Keywords - What is the proper way to type them

[UPDATE] Our lead dev says he thinks he entered it in as in your example 1. above.

But be forewarned, from our experience, it appears you can't re-edit your keywords once they're entered.

The edit field becomes unmodifiable once you enter your keywords. Grrrrrr.

You supposedly will be unable to edit them until your next update.

 

I used no spaces, and all my keywords are working. Mind, it took a good twelve hours for it to kick in. If you think about it, no spaces makes more sense, as they're being read into a database. Humans will never see them, so no need for the spaces.

 

I used spaces too.

 

Spaces as well. I can't believe Apple engineers would be so dense as to not account for whitespace (even if their web stuff has always been kind of shoddy).

 

i used spaces with no commas, and it appeared to work just fine.

If i search for "redneck" "chicken" I hit RKC just fine.
So I'm assuming the more common terms like arcade, minigame, etc. work fine as well.

 

Oh yeah, I definitely know they've made some terrible decisions here, but those are more interaction design / information architecture problems. Any programmer worth their salt should know to do whitespace stripping before updating a database with human-entered keywords. I have more confidence that they can get that much right, even if the App Store is a mess.

 

I just double checked our entries. I put in spaces. In the App Store, I tried my search. Some of the keywords work for the Search iTunes Store field in the upper left corner. If I Power Search in the App Store, then it finds our app based on all our keywords. So it seems the leading spaces don't matter. I did use multiple word keywords...

 

I used spaces rather than commas, since there were no instructions when this feature first showed up, so I didn't know exactly what was expected. Probably should have held off a while, but what are ya gonna do. I wrote Apple a brief email about this, and the response was:

"Failing to enter commas for your keywords in your initial keyword entry will have no effect on your search capabilities. Please remember to enter commas per the instructions on iTunes Connect the next time you enter keywords.

Your application is being successfully located by your designated keywords. In the future, please allow at least 24 hours for your initially-entered keywords to be applied to your search capabilities on the App Store. This is the appropriate timeframe to allow your content change to cache so that your search weight can be migrated from your application description to your keywords."

--Eric

 

- The only reason to skip spaces is to save some "real estate" for maybe another keyword. If I recall correctly they only give you 100 char string to play with.
- You may want to leave the keyword field empty for initial release. It looks like apple would pick up some words/phrases from app description. Them you can modify the keyword box (but only once) to adjust the search...

 

- The only reason to skip spaces is to save some "real estate" for maybe another keyword. If I recall correctly they only give you 100 char string to play with.
- You may want to leave the keyword field empty for initial release. It looks like apple would pick up some words/phrases from app description. Them you can modify the keyword box (but only once) to adjust the search...

 

Can you leave it empty? When attempting to save description changes, it requires keywords for already released products.

 

I guess, this is something that was changed just recently. I still have at least 2 Apps with blanks in keywords field. The last one was submitted ~1 month ago. Maybe apple is reading this forum ;-)

 

Keywords are a nice addition. But, why doesn't the app description contribute to the search too? Or it's just not working in my case??

 

Because people were horribly abusing that, putting in all sorts of unrelated junk and ruining search results. I'm sure keywords will be abused as well, but it's a fair bit more difficult (100 character limit, can only change them once per update).

--Eric

 

I think the keyword system is a great improvement over just searching every word in the app description. One thing I don't understand is why Apple continues to allow the abuse to continue - app descriptions continue to be searchable even after Apple added the keyword field. You just have to not add keywords. Of course, you can't change your app description or update your app. Perhaps this was actually a secret plot to slow down the number of app updates.

I would like to see more than 100 characters, and much better guidelines from Apple on what they will accept/reject as keywords. As long as Apple is reviewing these, then they should be able to make the field longer and just delete any keywords they disapprove of. Of course, still a limit to avoid reviewing 4000 characters of keywords. Perhaps 1000? I don't think I would ever need more than that, but I ran through 100 pretty fast. Making you resubmit the app seems like a wasted step. Just remove the rejected and unnecessary keywords so I know not to put them in next time.

 

I could well be totally wrong, but I got the impression this was a transitional period, and that at some point the app descriptions won't be searchable. Could be I just invented that idea though....

--Eric