So why is this emerging place so important? Simple. Users search for applications. If you do not rank high enough in any filter query or search, the potential end user will not find your application. Most developers want a wide as possible implementation base of their mobile applications. We have spent a lot of our lives working on SEO. There are several posts on this blog about this topic.

Mobile application SEO is not only an emerging market, but will likely become a large part of an enterprises digital presence. Once again, the rules that determine most of the “relevancy” in various mobile app marketplaces has not been made public leaving us to test and hypothesize. Uberity has now come to understand the evolution of such systems. So what should individuals do?

1. Don’t refer potential application users to your application with non-deterministic mechanisms like “search”. You have no control over AppStore SEO and it is a dynamic place with new apps being added every minute. A better method would be to use absolute mechanisms to resolve directly to your app such as QR codes or a URI.

2. If you are trying to get a higher ranking in either the AppStore or the Google Android Market, do some research to find out what terms people are actually searching for that are relevant to your application. For example, if you have a financial stock market monitoring application, you might find that people are searching for terms like “Dow Jones”, NYSE, Stock Market and more.

3. Use the terms from your research in your applications title and description. Some of these words are used for building a relevancy index for mobile applications.

4. Divide and conquer. Simply put, use your existing web presence to augment the mobile app visibility by creating links to it from your blog, website or other presence. Our initial research has shown some promising trends.

5. Don’t use punctuation marks in your app title. This is valuable real estate and most are ignored by the search utilities. For example, searching for a “*” reveals no applications (https://market.android.com/search?q=*&so=1&c=apps) while searching for either “!” or “+” reveal a bunch of Google applications (https://market.android.com/search?q=%2B&so=1&c=apps).

6. Ensure you categorize your mobile application properly. Misclassifying a game as a business app would confuse people.

If you are reading this and want to know more about what we are doing, please contact us at info at uberity dot com or by visiting our website at http://www.uberity.com.

Here is a use case. We built an application called Magic Screen Pro. It is a drawing application yet when a search on “drawing” is done, our application does not show up in the first 100 search results. This means it is invisible to the end users.

There are currently only a handful of dominant mobile application stores such as Apple’s App Store, the Google Android Market and BlackBerry’s App World. Additionally, to add to the complexity of SEO for Mobile applications, many app stores exist with variants of the major app stores and are filtered by criteria such as ratings, downloads, languages, countries, and paid vs. free apps. In a coming series of articles, I will build off previous SEO articles and write about some of my preliminary findings.

One of the first things to note is that the models used by Apple, Google, and RIM all seem to have both similarities and major differences. Unlike web searches, app store results are presented as a combination of filter query and rankings algorithms. The filters have several normalized components such as “most popular” and “price”. The problem seems to arise when a generic mobile application is sought via the search tool in an app store. For example, searching on Google’s Android Market for “Stock Market” results in over 1,000 results on the first set of results (over 21,000 in total as of the date of this post – https://market.android.com/search?q=stock+market&so=1&c=apps. The results are ordered the same whether you search from the Google Market application itself vs. a web search.

A demonstration of how the appstore SEO mechanism works

This similarity also appears within the Apple App Store.

AppStore SEO shows no change between device or web based access.

So how do the results get ranked? Let’s look at Google first. The Android Market uses three specific filters – price, safe search (presumably to ward off adult content), and a “sort by” filter. The latter has “relevance” selected as default. They are shown below.

Use filters to get more accurate mobil SEO results

The “Sort by Relevance” is the key filter to understand. The exact mechanism by which it works is private, similar to Apple’s App Store. So how does Google determine “relevance”? At first I had assumed it was the size of the install base however this turned out to be a dead end. In fact, at a meta level, the first five results are not correct. Fox Financial News has the first application. I find it hard to believe it is the most relevant for the term “Stock Market”. The second highest ranked app is actually a link to the “App Brain Market”. When a user clicks through to https://market.android.com/details?id=com.appspot.swisscodemonkeys.apps&feature=search_result and looks, there is no mention either in visible text or source code of the search term “stock market”. The third result is by Snapworks Technologies and has an install base of between 100,000 to 500,000.

By Google’s own admission, the following criteria is available to search for apps:

Featured: great apps hand-picked by the Android Market team
Top Free: popular free apps of all time
Top New Free: popular free apps less than 30 days old
Top Paid: popular paid apps of all time
Top New Paid: popular paid apps less than 30 days old
Top Grossing: applications and games generating the most revenue, including app purchases and in-app payments
Trending Apps: apps showing a hockey stick growth in installs in the last 24 hours
Editors’ Choice Apps: Some of the very best apps available for Android, chosen by the Android Market team
Top Developer: Some of the very best developers on Android Market, chosen by the Android Market team

On top of this, some variants of Android markets allow users to filter results based on the version of Android. There are some additional criteria for allowing applications to be found.

Priced applications availability: Priced apps are only available to buyers in these countries. If you are not in a buyer-supported country, you will be unable to view priced applications.

Location: You may only view the version of Market for your country. For example, UK users may only view the UK version of Android Market from their devices. If a developer has not targeted his app to your home country, you may be unable to view it.

Mobile service provider: In addition to targeting for location, a developer may also target their application to specific mobile service providers. If a developer is not targeting your mobile service provider, you will not be able to view the application.

Note that Google declares that no application may appear in a top spot as a result of paying to be featured. Could it be that they intend to let the market dynamically choose the top results as is done with normal search engine results? I believe that this is in fact the case. The pattern is very simple – the first search result page contains code that tracks which applications users select. The system itself is not perfect and will need to be augmented with ontological classifications, however it is the only logical path to take.

So what works? For starters, the title of the application seems to be worth its weight in gold. Recall the earlier example of my Magic Screen Pro application not showing up for the term “drawing”. When you search for “Magic Screen”, it appears in the #7 position out of 805 applications.

Google also seems to track the clicks on a search result, hence the more people that click through on each app counts as votes towards raising the ranking in the overall application store.

What seems to not affect mobile application SEO? We have found that the choice of technologies used to build an applications seem to be irrelevant. Even in the App Store where one could suspect that Apple might be prejudiced against applications built using Adobe Flash Builder tooling, it seems to make no difference.

What needs to be researched more? Uberity plans on conducting further research into the exact mechanisms used including external links, links from other mobile applications, keyword usage in app descriptions, and more. This aspect of technology is relatively new and requires proper research to help developers understand the basics. Stay tuned for more as information becomes available.

Many of you have asked me what I am doing next or offered me jobs. I appreciate that and the thought of entering into another job is horrifying to me. I worked eight years at a big company, learned a lot, and have to digest the good, the band and the truly ugly. Adobe has been a very important role in my life and will continue to be a company I work with. My colleagues on the Evangelism team are all great individuals and I’m sure we’ll cross paths again, even if I am hopeless at video games. I honestly wish all of them the most in terms of happiness and fulfilment.

So what is next? As the blues brothers did, so has Yellow Dragon Software. We are “Getting the band back together” to work on some game changing services and software. The new company, aptly named Überity, is operating in stealth mode right now. A lot of you have requested information and we honestly are in stealth mode right now. We cannot divulge anything publicly however if you wish to be amongst the first to know what we are doing, you can sign up now at http://www.uberity.com and request to be placed on the list.

Why are we doing this? Simple. Doing what you like to do to earn a living is coolest thing an individual can have. Me, a former professional mountain biker, professional musician and tech guy understands this better now that I did a decade ago. We LOVE innovation and solving complex problems. We love delivering value to society. We love doing what we love doing. Our work has to be fun. How cool would that be? This is why Überity exists.

According to the urban dictionary:

Uberian
The adjective form of the adverb, “uber.” Used to describe nouns that are “uber cool,” without using the phrase “uber cool” and sounding like a lil babe. Uberious has also been known to be used, as well as the noun form, “uberity.”
Dude I totes love that club it was uberian.
To us, doing what we love for a living is about as cool as it gets.

“The Open Data Foundation is committed to using and contributing to international standards and is a project- and results-focussed organisation. We believe in using open standards to deliver measurable benefits in solving business problems in the collection, production, and dissemination of statistics. The aim is use and integrate these standards in a coherent and consistent way, to develop tools and techniques to make them easy to use, and thereby work towards a universal and harmonised statistical architecture.”

As noble as it sounds, the devil is often in the details.  I have a meeting later today with David Eaves, an Open Data guru who has worked with many governments including the Government of British Columbia, Vancouver City Council (as championed by Andrea Reimer) and even at the national level.  The gist of the work is that if we, as taxpayers, are footing the bill to create this data, shouldn’t we be able to use it to make informed decisions?  The answer to me is an overwhelming yes.  So what about the details then?

If you take a look at the data publishing done my most agencies, it is often in mixed standards (flattened PDF’s, Spreadsheets, Custom CSV (both text and binary), XML and more.  Some o these format are easy to work with but trying to parse a spreadsheet with a non-deterministic style to it is a daunting task.

We recently took on such work for a proof of concept for the government of British Columbia.  I worked with some CSV data from this stie and created a mobile application that runs on iOS, Android and BlackBerry Tablet.

One of the things that jumps right out is that open data needs a specialized set of Message Exchange Patterns and the published data has to be deterministic, available in many formats (like JSON/XML) and that callback and notification support is required in the event the data changes.  As an example, this data is published as static data.  As soon as I use it by embedding it, it could be obsolete if the original copy changes.

Another issue is that spreadsheets are not deterministic.  If you have a spreadsheet and output CSV such as this:

Duane, Nickull, Human, Vancouver

Bill, Gates, Human, Seattle

This is an annotation.  No one knows how to account for this if it changes nor how many lines it takes.  Sometimes, naturally occurring commas can also be inside an annotation.  OMG – what can be done?

Second, Set, Of, Data

Third, Set, Of, Data

This is an annotation.  No one knows how to account for this if it changes nor how many lines it takes.  Sometimes, naturally occurring commas can also be inside an annotation.  OMG – what can be done?

Second, Set, Of, Data

Third, Set, Of, Data

it can be major headaches for those trying to parse the data.  XML is far better yet this XML has issues:

These are relatively small data sets too.  Imagine large data sets being requested by mobile devices?

What is required in this industry is a new type of data server that can address some of these problems.  Ideas are being formed now.