How To Create Filtered URL’s With dsIDXpress
With dsIDXpress (our WordPress IDX plugin), you can load property search results on a post or page with a relatively simple URL structure.
The URL structure always starts with /idx.
So if you’re domain name is johndoerealestate.com, the dsIDXpress “virtual” pages would always start with johndoerealestate.com/idx.
From there, it’s up to you to determine what listings you want to pull up, and in what area. You can pull up listings by city, community, tract and zip code. So each of those URL structures would look like this:
johndoerealestate.com/idx/city/irvine
johndoerealestate.com/idx/community/irvine
johndoerealestate.com/idx/tract/irvine
johndoerealestate.com/idx/zip/92222
…of course, you’ll want to replace “Irvine” with whatever area name you’re trying to pull up.
Once you’ve decided what area you want to pull listings from, you can then start to add additional parameters to that URL structure to produce a more narrowly defined search results.
To use parameters, you need to follow the following format:
johndoerealestate.com/idx/city/irvine/?parameter¶meter¶meter
First: You want to define your are type and area name. In my example, I did: /idx/city/irvine.
Second: To insert your first parameter, you want to add a “?” before inserting your initial parameter.
Third: To separate from one parameter and the next one, you’ll separate them using the “&” symbol.
So let’s say that we want to pull up listings in the city of Irvine between $300,000 and $400,000. First, we’ll need to find the parameters for defining a minimum price range and a maximum price range.
If we look at the list of parameters in our Help Desk, you’ll see that those parameters are:
idx-q-PriceMin=
idx-q-PriceMax=
So, our entire URL structure would look like:
johndoerealestate.com/idx/city/irvine/?idx-q-PriceMin=300000&idx-q-PriceMax=400000
Benefits of Using Link-Structure:
Once you’ve determined the link-structure for a certain set of search results, you can link to that content in your sidebar or in the body of your content.
Using Link-Structure In Your Sidebar
Here’s an example from MattPernice.com for how to use the custom link-structure in the sidebar of your website:
The great thing about this is that you can have a tremendous amount of links within a very compact space.
Using Link-Structure In the Body of Your Content
Here’s an example of how to use the custom link-structure on a post or page:
The benefits here are that in addition to displaying the short-code on a page, you’re also linking to additional listings within the body of the content so you’re giving your site visitors an easier way to search listings by price range, and you’re making it easier for search engines to crawl and index the additional links on that page.
How are you using filtered URL’s with dsIDXpress?
Are you using the custom link-structure to pull up listings in specific areas? If you’re still stuck on how to use the filtered URL’s to pull up a specific set of listings, let me know what you want to pull up and I’ll point you in the right direction…