A sneak peek inside Diverse Solutions dsIDXpress Wordpress plugin

Last night, Diverse Solutions announced their new plugin, dsIDXpress (currently in beta testing).

I’ve been fortunate to be an early tester of this plugin, and can sum its potential up in one word:

Awesome. Radical. Kick ass.

OK, that’s four words. Work with me…

What dsIDXpress does, in a nutshell, is create search engine indexable pages of listings. This can be done via widgets for your  listings,  cities you work in, zip codes, communities, and even specific IDX links you create in the backend of the Diverse Solutions SearchAgent Pro IDX solution. The plugin also has short code support that makes it easy to integrate listings into a blog post or page.

This is powerful stuff people.

Live Examples of dsIDXpress in Action

You can see examples of the listing, city and neighborhood widgets in the footer of TPREG (The Phoenix Real Estate Guy).

Here is an example of what you can do with zip code searches (the page is ugly — that’s my fault, not the plugins).

This post uses the plugin short code to display the five most recent new listings for Scottsdale, AZ.

An individual listing looks like this.

So, does it work?

Unlike most IDX listing output in web/blog pages, none of what the plugin generates is framed. Search engines have difficulty seeing inside frames, so if you want IDX listing information to be seen and indexed by search engines, you’ve got to get them outside of frames and into something the Google’s of the world can “see”.

And this plugin does exactly that.

Here’s a snapshot of the Google crawl stats from my blog:

Click image for larger view

Notice that large spike in the first and second charts? That’s the number of pages crawled and amount downloaded by Google since I installed the plugin. In other words, since installation, Google as found many more pages on my site. And SEO 101 tells us Google likes sites with lots of pages.

Actual Search Results from dsIDXpress

Within a couple of days of installing the “property list” widget (the map in bottom left of the footer on TPREG), every single one of our listings ranked #1 on Google for a search on the address. If you think people don’t go to Google and search addresses, think again. In the last 3 days, there have been 23 searches for our listing addresses that wound up landing on TPREG. That’s not a ton of traffic, but patience Grasshopper, it’s only been 3 days.

Yesterday, I added several community searches in the widget in the bottom right of TPREG’s footer. Today, several of those community pages rank #1 on Google for the search term “community name Real Estate” (ie: Ray Ranch real estate, Lyons Gate real estate, etc) . This includes communities I have never previously targeted on the blog. And they are ranking ahead of other little real estate sites like Trulia.com, Homes.com, Realtor.com, Point2 Agent and more. And yes, people have already visited via those terms. These “long tail” terms are golden. Someone that Google’s “Lyons Gate real estate” probably falls into one of two categories — someone who knows about Lyons Gate and is considering buying there, or someone that lives in Lyons Gate and is considering selling. I like it when those types of people land on the blog, and simply adding “Lyons Gate” to a widget, which dumps new listings for that area into a blog page, and having it updated multiple times a day is. . .

. . . powerful stuff people.

Think of the possibilities, and the coolness…

Write a blog post about a community, or a zip code, or a certain kind of home (think “Phoenix homes between $300 – $350K”). Put a tiny piece of short code at the bottom of the post, and this plugin will automagically add in current listings. Current as in someone pulls that post up a year from now and they see new listings based on the time they view the post, not when the post was published.

This is powerful stuff people.

I’m not remotely close to being an “SEO expert”, so I can’t say if the search results I’ve seen would be easily duplicated. TPREG enjoys a fair amount of love from Google and is crawled frequently and deeply. I’m sure this helps. But I believe implementation of this plugin on any blog would prove very beneficial. Listings tend to be “keyword rich”, and I know for a fact that people use search terms including community names, addresses and MLS numbers. Having those items indexable, and new content constantly brought onto your site (automatically!) has to be a great thing for any blog on any level.

Check the post on the DS blog for more details and info. Again, the plugin is in beta, but I suspect it will be released pretty quickly. You’ll have to be a DS SearchAgent Pro user to utilize it, and there will be a price to pay (price point hasn’t been released yet). But ya gotta believe this is powerful stuff people!