Even if your app is the coolest in the world your audience may not find it buried with the 50,000+ other apps on the app store! Clearly your customers need a way to find your app.

I can think of three major ways that customers find your app:

Position

Most developers who have released apps know that there is a sort of side-quest to keeping your app at the top of the lists that customers see. This involves constantly improving your app and releasing updates although with a secret trick. So, you do have control over #1 above but it is a temporary solution at best.

Recommendations

Everyone knows that word of mouth is essential in sales and on the Internet word of mouth has a lot of venues. Developers cannot really control this outside of making an awesome app that people love and possible throwing a strategic promo code out to a blogger or two.

Keywords

Seeding your app description with keywords is one technique that I have not heard discussed often. People who run marketing oriented websites know that they can find out what search terms that users type into browsers to find what they want. You can do the same thing with the App Store’s search engine.

If you do this you are more likely to reach users who already know what they want and are actually looking to buy something. For example, I have an app that is for wine tasting. So, I made sure that I included search terms that wine drinkers are likely to include like “tasting note”, “wine journal”, “wine’ and so on.

This approach may be better for niche audiences and some of it may occur naturally if you simply write a coherent description. However, take extra care to include words that are likely to resonate with your audience. As time goes on you will want the sales coming from people searching out your terms because it will get increasingly difficult to stay at the top of the release date lists.

How do you use keywords to promote your apps? Please comment below!

Can Your Audience Even Find Your App?…

You’ve been kicked (a good thing) – Trackback from iPhoneKicks.com – iPhone SDK links, community driven…

Apple made some changes to way the App Store Search worked. I can’t remember the details but basically it was to prevent certain developers from just listing every popular app name in their app description. You still see these apps now. Their actual app description is short and then they have the following (regardless of what their app does)

sexy
Girls
Pocket God
Flight Control
etc. etc. etc

Anyway I do believe that making your App description relevant to your App using keywords does work but be wary for example, if there is an app called “wine journal” and you use the same keyword…you may find it negatively effects where you appear in the search list.

Caveat – Apple may well have changed things again. They are forever tinkering with the store.

Interesting article : http://aclevertwist.com/p/6-tips-to-optimize-itunes-app-store-search-itunes-seo

reading this I would guess the change I suggested was to give the App name higher priority over a bunch of description keywords. So the same apps are found but the truly relevant should be higher up the list.

[...] at How To Make iPhone Apps there’s a discussion of leveraging your app [...]

Interesting reads – I should say that depending on gray hat tactics to push your app to the top of the list is not necessarily my recommendation. For me, I think you should simply be reasonable and make sure that your images and app description to their job and help you communicate to your audience.

Google is like this too- marketers find some tactic to fool the search engine and it lasts maybe a month.