One of the most important factors in making sure your site is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) friendly is the proper use of HTML structure. It’s very important for SEO to make sure your website and page content makes proper use of HTML elements to guide search engines.
If you’re using a quality framework like Genesis or Equity, you’re off to a great start as these frameworks place a lot of emphasis on HTML friendly coding.
For real estate sites using an IDX service, your IDX service can also have a huge impact on how well your website does with SEO.
I really like IDX Broker. One of the reasons is IDX Broker is very SEO friendly when set up properly. Thing such as:
- In page content means your content is picked up by search engines (Google). Some IDX services use iFrames to display content, which is not SEO friendly
- Custom SEO friendly URLs allow you to have things such as address, city, state in the URL of your property detail page
- Custom Title tags, meta tags, and page headers allow you to make sure your site is sending SEO friendly information
- Mobile responsive layouts meet Google’s new “Mobile Friendly” search ranking
- HTML and XML sitemaps
- Ability to create very specific Listings pages
These are just some of the things that make IDX Broker great for SEO. If you’re willing to spend some time to optimize your website with IDX Broker, you will see a lot of success with your SEO.
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Something Was Missing
Until recently, one important factor was missing from IDX Broker. When viewing a single property detail page, there was no way to display the address in an H1 tag. What’s an H1 tag? H1 – H6 tags are html “flags” that let search engines scan the sections of the page.
H1 is the most important headline on the page, one that tells search engines what this page is about. Previously, you could add an H1 tag to your single property detail page, but it wasn’t unique to the page. In other words, if you added an H1 in IDX Broker, it would be exactly the same for all single property pages and was not unique to the property you’re viewing.
Welcome IDX Dynamic Headers
Recently, IDX Broker added the ability to create dynamic headers on your single property listing page (loud sound of applause). What does this mean? This means you can now have dynamic, page specific headers for your single property page.
Dynamic, page specific headers mean you can display the address of the page you’re listing in your page header, something that was impossible to do before (well, it was possible through advanced coding, but not SEO effective).
This is done through the use of variable tags, a sort of “placeholder”, that allows you to to create custom, dynamic headers for your page.
Shouldn’t this be done automatically?
When I first learned about this, I didn’t like the idea that I had to set this up to get it to work properly. I mean, there’s already a million things to set up, shouldn’t the page just display the address as an H1 tag so I don’t have to worry about it?
Once I tried it out, I realized that this is much nicer because it allows you to decide how you’d like to display this information. What works for me might not work for you. Through the use of variables, you can create your header exactly the way you’d like it to display, leaving the decision making up to you.
Total control over HTML markup
Another great thing about the way IDX set this up is that you have control over the markup you use. For example, it’s bad practice to use more than one H1 tag on a page (there are exceptions with HTML5, but that’s beyond the scope of this article). If your WordPress theme displays an H1 tag on this page and you have no control over that, you might decide it’s better to make your address an H2 tag so you don’t have to worry about any possible negative SEO impact.
There is one drawback to this method. If you’re using HTML markup, such as a header tag (H1 – H6) or paragraph (p) tag and one of the variables is empty, that HTML will still be output and may effect the appearance of your page. That’s just something to be aware of so you don’t get too carried away here.
How Do Dynamic Page Headers Work?
IDX Broker now has 13 variables that you can use to display information in your header. If you’ve read my article about how to improve your website’s IDX meta information (titles and meta tags), you’ll be somewhat familiar with these.
The variables that you can use for your Single Property Detail page are:
- {{listingID}} – Displays listing ID
- {{address}} – Displays Address
- {{cityName}} – Displays city name
- {{state}} – Displays state name
- {{stateAbrv}} – Displays state abbreviation
- {{zipcode}} – Displays zipcode
- {{countyName}} – Displays county name
- {{listingPrice}} – Displays listing price
- {{idxPropType}} – Displays IDX property type
- {{propType}} – Displays property type
- {{propSubType}} – Displays property sub type
- {{displayName}} – Displays IDX account name
- {{remarksConcat}} – Displays short property description
These variables allow you to create your custom header. For example, if you’d like to display “Address, City, State ZIP”, you would enter:
“{{address}}, {{cityName}}, {{state}} {{zipcode}}”.
This would dynamically grab the address, city, state and zip for the page you’re viewing and display it the way you specified in your header setup.
How To Add Your Dynamic Header
To set this up, login to your IDX Broker admin and go to “Designs > Subheaders”. Once there, select “Categories”, then in the box on the left click on the “Details” link. It will turn blue to let you know you’ve selected it, and you’ll see the text editor on the right:
For this example, I’m going to display:
- Address, city, state and zip and MLS number inside an H1 tag
- Listing type and county inside an H2 tag
Here is the code I’ll be using, although you can easily do this without code in the text editor:
[gist id=”b09d6d703f30b7438acf” file=”idx-broker-single-listing-header.html”]
If you click the “HTML” link on your text editor (upper right toolbar), it will open a popup where you can paste your HTML code. If you prefer to use the editor, you can add your variables inside the text editor along with any additional text, highlight the text you want to convert, and use the dropdown to assign a format (Heading 1, Heading 2, Paragraph), etc.
Here is the default layout for a single property detail listing page, without the header added:
And here is the result adding the custom header using the code above:
If you look at the code that is output, it’s exactly as you expect it should be:
[gist id=”b09d6d703f30b7438acf” file=”idx-broker-single-listing-output.html”]
That’s it! Set it up one time and it will dynamically fill in the placeholders (variables) with the current pages listing information, in the format that you’ve laid out. This is a fast and effective way to improve your page’s SEO.
What’s next?
It’s so great to see IDX being so responsive to user’s requests. I’ve requested this as a feature, and I know other developers and end users have as well.
It would be great to see some provision for empty variables, but I’m not sure how that would be possible given the current system.
Something else I am looking into is if there’s a way, and any benefit to using Schema Markup here. Sites like Zillow do use Schema Markup, and quality frameworks like Equity and Genesis also support Schema, but it has to be formatted properly. It’s definitely something to look into.
So thanks again to IDX Broker for another great improvement! Let’s keep them coming.
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