Introducing dsIDXpress our new WordPress Plugin [Beta]

Our elves have been hard at work here at Diverse Solutions working on something special for you this holiday season. Over the last year or so we have been receiving requests for search engine index-able listings and rightfully so. It is a great way to generate some additional traffic to your website for that long tail segment. Some of you more tech savvy people have found a work around using our current dsSearchAgent Pro product but it’s not easy.   We’re going to change that.  Since WordPress is open source, has the ability to allow custom plug-ins and has become the platform of choice for a lot of websites/blogs these days we figured there isn’t a better choice to roll out our new IDX product on. We have created dsIDXpress.  It is a plug-in for WordPress that allows not only your clients to search the IDX natively via WordPress but more importantly it allows the search engines to index these listings too.

We are seeing some incredible results so far. One of our beta testers, who shall remain nameless, added the “property list” widget to his footer for his listings(14) and now the address for each one of those properties shows up #1 in Google with a link to the details page for that listing. In one week! I know talk is cheap but as we get more testers we’ll start showing some good hard evidence on how this thing kicks ass.

This is just a quick overview of what the plug-in can do at this time. We have many more ideas that are in the works that will be included in the plug in upon final release. Currently we are in the beta testing stage with this product and it is not available to the general public just yet. Product pricing and a final release date have not been set. If you are a current dsSearchAgent Pro client and would like to help us beta test this, or have comments, we’d love to hear from you.

Screenshots

Feature List

Widgets

• Search
  • Visitors can search for properties via a simple, pre-built WordPress search widget. The widget’s search criteria include the property type, city, min and max prices, min beds, min baths and square feet.
  • Each search widget can be customized with a title and a list of cities by the blog owner.
  • The search form is built in such a way that it can be submitted by any search engine that supports forms (of which Google is one).
• Area List
  • Visitors can see a simple list of links for the cities, communities, tracts, and zip codes that the blog owner has configured for each area list widget. All links created in these widgets are easily crawl-able by search engines.
• Property List
  • Visitors can see a configurable list of properties presented in three different modes. All of the HTML for the three modes is placed directly on the page containing the widget when the page is loaded; the modes are toggled via JavaScript. Search engines see all of the content for these widgets.
    • A list mode shows the properties as a simple list of links. These links are good for a simple, short, non-flashy display of the properties. These links are crawl-able by search engines
    • A map mode shows the properties on a map. On hover, a small property thumbnail photo is shown along with some relevant details.
    • A detailed mode shows the essential details of each property as well as a single 100px wide photo of each property. The different properties shown in the detailed mode can be navigated with “previous” and “next” buttons.
  • This widget can be configured to show a user-defined number of properties from four different sources.
    • It can show properties from a specific city, community, tract, or zip with a user-defined order (ex. top 10 properties in Laguna Beach order by highest price first).
    • It can show only the agent’s properties.
    • It can show only the office’s properties.
    • It can show properties from a link created in the control panel if you have our dsSearchAgent Pro IDX product. This allows for a great deal of flexibility.

Results

• The matching property results for the search criteria are displayed 25 per page with paging links at the top and bottom of the results.
• The search architecture is designed from the ground-up to be extremely fast. In many cases, we’ve found it to actually be faster than bringing up a WordPress post within the blog.
• Each listing in the results displays a 250px wide photo, the address, city, price, and other important information.
• Default sort order is to show newest listings first. This ensures a constant churn of properties in the first few pages of results for any search query.
• The title for the fake blog post (since we’re essentially displaying all of the results in a blog post) corresponds to the name of the area searched. The title is automatically placed in the area where the post title would go (usually in an H2 tag or something) and in the TITLE tag of the page.
  • Las Flores community searched => “Real estate in the Las Flores community”
  • Laguna Beach city searched => “Real estate in the city of Laguna beach”
  • Melinda Heights tract searched => “Real estate in the Melinda Heights area”
  • 92688 zip searched => “Real estate in the 92688 zip code”
• Link structure:
  • yourblog.com/idx/city/laguna-beach/ loads the 25 newest properties in Laguna Beach with links to the older results

Details

• Example for the title of the blog post and in the HTML TITLE tag: 2665 Riviera Dr, Laguna Beach, CA 92651 (MLS # L29755)
• Property details includes photo slideshow, all of the basic property info, the property description, many other fields and features, and a Google map showing the location of the property.
• Photo slideshow is loaded via JavaScript and Flash. Visitors without Flash / JavaScript, including search engines, will see the primary photo for the listing along with an appropriate ALT attribute for the photo.
• Link structure:
  • Simple example for loading property details for MLS #L29755: yourblog.com/idx/mls-l29755-2665_riviera_dr_laguna_beach_ca_92651

Shortcodes

• Shortcodes are small bits of text that can be embedded in blog pages or posts by the blogger. When the page or post is loaded, the shortcode text itself is replaced with other data. In the case of dsIDXpress, the IDX shortcodes are replaced with live data from the MLS so that whether the post / page is viewed the day it’s saved or 3 weeks after, the data will be up to date.
  • idx-listing: Will show property details when given an MLS number. Example: [idx-listing mlsnumber=”U8000471″]
  • idx-listings: One example use of this shortcode would be when an agent wants to create a page for a particular city or community and wants to list the top 20 most-recently-listed properties in that area. Example: [idx-listings city=”Laguna Beach”]