Keyword Stuffing Is Never A Good Idea

January 9th, 2014

by Anh Nguyen

COO & Co-Founder at Gummicube, Inc

Since we started helping developers with App Store Optimization all the way back in 2011, knowledge of the importance of ASO has spread among the app development community. This is great news! We want developers to get great results from their apps in the App Store and acquire the highest quality users which can only come from App Store Search. Unfortunately, just like traditional SEO for the web there are “white hat” (good) and “black hat” (bad) methods of optimizing your app for App Store search. White hat methods will get you great results over time while black hat methods may get your app kicked out of the store.

One key part of App Store Optimization is writing the title and description for your app. Picking the correct keywords and managing keyword density is incredibly important to be “found” with the best keywords in App Store search. When going through through this process (which we manage on behalf of our clients) it is important to know the difference between writing a useful description that includes keywords and “keyword stuffing”. Keyword stuffing is considered a black hat technique in which random keywords are “stuffed” into metadata with the hopes of being ranked for those keywords.

Unfortunately, keyword stuffing doesn’t work over the long term for most developers. First, it confuses consumers. Nobody knows how to read a keyword title that is incredibly long and most end users avoid apps that appear to be spammy. Second, Apple and Google don’t like this practice. More and more apps are being rejected from the review process because their titles are stuffed with keywords that make no sense from an end user prospective. The general rule that we follow when crafting titles and descriptions for apps is that if a consumer doesn’t understand what you offer from reading the title, it is a bad title and may be “keyword stuffed”.

High quality apps + high quality metadata

high quality users.

Always remember that your title and description are written for the end user first. Within this framework of telling the user what an app is all about, you then must thread in the key words and phrases that are important to your app from a metadata prospective. This is what Apple and Google expect to see when they are reviewing your app and in practice following this rule helps developers over the life of their app.