I will create a Twitter search widget to show Walkscore Tweets for various neighborhoods. I have created these tweets using Twitter API and Walkscore API. Note that I am searching using a Hash Tag (see # sign before the search term), which is more powerful than a simple search.

Twitter Search Widget Generation

In the above page, customize various settings like colors, widget size and use Test settings button to preview the widget. Once you are satisfied, use Finish & Grab Code to copy the code and paste on your web site or blog. See it in action!

You can also create Twitter Profile Widget to display your most recent Tweets on any web page as shown below.

Create Twitter Profile Widget

See it in action!

Try Facebook widget and share your tweets on Facebook.

Get your Twitter button so that visitors to your web site can add your web content to twitter.

Or, show off your follower base using the button from Twitter Counter as shown here.

source: Facebook

Exciting news! Fresh from today’s Facebook f8 conference in San Francisco, there’s a whole slew of new Facebook social plugins that you can easily incorporate into your site:

All Facebook Social Plugins

You can also read more about Facebook’s new direction here: The Next Evolution of the Facebook Platform

Drew and Justin have recently written some great tips on using Facebook, and with their new social plugins it’s even easier to connect your site to the social graph. You can add the basic “like” button just by copying and pasting code into your site, and from that foundation you can add a ton of additional features.   These changes go beyond just adding new plugins: Facebook believes the underlying structure of the web is changing to fully integrate our social graphs, and they intend to be at the center of it.  Below are all the new features along with the summary quoted from Facebook’s description:

Like Button: ”The Like button lets users share pages from your site back to their Facebook profile with one click.”

Recommendations: ”The Recommendations plugin gives users personalized suggestions for pages on your site they might like.”

Login with Faces: ”The Login with Faces plugin shows profile pictures of the user’s friends who have already signed up for your site in addition to a login button.”

Comments: ”The Comments plugin lets users comment on any piece of content on your site.”

Activity Feed: ”The Activity Feed plugin shows users what their friends are doing on your site through likes and comments.”

Like Box: ”The Like box enables users to like your Facebook Page and view its stream directly from your website.”

Facepile: ”The Facepile plugin shows profile pictures of the user’s friends who have already signed up for your site.”

Live Stream: ”The Live Stream plugin lets your users share activity and comments in real-time as they interact during a live event.”

Check it out!

Creating A Conduit Toolbar for Internet Browsers

Conduit.com is a site that allows you to create a “custom” toolbar that works with popular Internet browsers like Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari.  The toolbar can be custom created from scratch, then offered as an additional tool allowing users a direct interface or “Conduit” to the most valuable and important segments and links of your Blog or website.

Having a custom toolbar available to readers can add extra value to those who regularly visit your site.  By adding this toolbar to your browser, or creating your own custom toolbar, users can access the important information or areas of your site they want to know more about without having try and find it on your site.  The only question and challenge for you is, what should you add to the toolbar to make it the most useful and powerful tool for your readers?

Creating a custom toolbar at Conduit.com is fast and easy, and the best part is that it’s FREE.  Imagine having your customized toolbar installed on millions of browsers across the web. It would not only provide extra value to your readers, but could increase the traffic and exposure to your site.

Here is a sample of one I created for GeekEstateBlog, you might want one of these for your site or Blog.

Try the toolbar on your browser, then Click Here, to create one of your own.
Select Your Browser Below To Download The Geek Estate Blog Toolbar.

Earlier this week, the plugin came out of beta testing and has been released for general availability.

Here is part of the Diverse Solutions press release (full release):

Diverse Solutions announced today that they have released a new IDX product called dsIDXpress. The product allows agents and brokers using WordPress to get property listings on their own website and own domain to be indexed by the major search engines. dsIDXpress is different than traditional IDX solutions in that it has both the standard consumer search capabilities as well as the ability to insert specific listings or groups of listings into any page or blog post with their Live Listings(sm) shortcodes. The plugin also automatically builds in search-engine-friendly city, community, and zip code pages that show available properties in the respective areas. Furthermore, listing detail pages are available for every property in the MLS. Overall, dsIDXpress is being touted as a low cost alternative to functionality that was previously only available in high- end custom websites.

Diverse also has a web site dedicated to the plugin — dsidxpress.com

Pricing is currently set at $99.95 for set up and $29.95/month per domain (some MLS’s may have additional fees).

Since installing the various beta versions of the plugin (and still not using it anywhere close to its fullest capability), I am continuing to see heavy indexing of plugin generated pages.

As you can see in the Google Analytics chart below for Phoenix Real Estate Guy (TPREG), there has been a distinct increase in traffic since installing the plugin:

The plugin was installed on Dec 18 and on Dec 26 I added several sidebar links that generate IDX pages as well as a zip code “directory”. Shortly after that, a noticeable increase in traffic occurred. The traffic bump the week prior to Jan 1 is partly due to a post about local New Year’s Eve events, but there is no question that people are Googling addresses, MLS numbers and “longtail” search terms and landing on the site. Here is a real-time shot of some Sitemeter stats showing where currently on-line visitors landed:

Red arrows indicate visitors landing on dsIDXPress generated pages

This particular mix of visitors landing on normal blog pages and dsIDXPress generated pages holds true pretty much every time I take a peek at the real-time visits.

Of note, these results may not fold true for every user. I’m not an SEO expert, but I do know that TPREG enjoys a fair amount of “Google juice” and authority. I was also the first user of the plugin in Phoenix, so there may be a “first adopter” advantage. There is a legitimate question the release of this plugin poses — what will happen when multiple people in the same market are using it? (See a good discussion of this on Jeff Corbet’s xBroker blog, and the Diverse Solutions blog).

Personally, I feel the real power of this plugin is NOT in getting every listing in your MLS indexed (that won’t happen anyway. I doubt there is a single real estate web site out there with the “juice” or authority for that to happen). The real power comes with building content around indexed IDX pages. I’m in love with the idea of writing a blog post about a particular neighborhood, or type of property, and “embedding” indexable listings into the post. This way, when a user comes by 6 months (or 6 years) after the post is published, they will be presented with live listings at the time of their visit, not from the time the post was written.

That is freaking cool. . .

Here’s just a small taste of some of my favorite free widgets. Disclaimer: Two of them were built by my team. I have to do a little bit of blatant self promotion .

Calculators

• Mortgage Loan Place Calculator – This is one of the tools that our team is responsible for. The unique thing about it is the fact that it visualizes mortgage payments in a different way than most calculators. There’s also a slick white label version available that allows you to add a custom logo and colors making site integration a snap.
• MortagageCalculator.org Widget – One of the most popular mortgage calculator sites on the web is MortgageCalculator.org. This popular widget is a plain and simple calculator that works well if you’re looking for something easy to slap into a blog sidebar.
• How Much House Can I Afford? Widget – Prospective homeowners are constantly trying to figure out how much house they can afford. This handy calculator makes it easy to estimate the answer to that question.

Maps

• Google Maps – The industry standard mapping product. A lot of the widgets below are based on Google’s product but if you need something custom, Google makes it pretty easy to do your own mashups.
• Walkscore Widget – The concept of a walkscore is fairly new but really relevant today more than ever. Many buyers demand homes that are in close proximity to certain amenities (to be green, to live in the “action,” and for other reasons) and walkscore’s widget is a standardized way to compare different areas.

Real Estate Specific Sites

• Zillow Widgets – Real estate mega-site Zillow has an awesome array of widgets to jazz your site up. My favorites are the Real Estate Stats Chart tool and the My Zillow Linstings widget tool.
• Trulia Map Widget – Zillow’s arch-rival in the online real estate has a nifty white label listings map. If you’re a Trulia user, you can customize it to show just your listings.

Real Estate Research

• AltosResearch Widget – Altos offers a cool, free local real estate index chart. Web savvy shoppers love research tools and Altos is the expert solution in the space.
• RentBits Widget – This might not be the most relevant widget for RE agents but it’s cool nevertheless. It allows users to create a custom rental comparison list that shows average rents for various areas in an MSA.
• Zilpy Widget – Zilpy is another slightly less relevant home-selling widget but still really awesome for general RE related info. It’s similar to the RentBits tool and aggregates average rents for an area.
• Topix Widget – Topix’s real estate widgets is a simple news aggregator that can be used to populate your sidebar with free, relevant info and links to articles.

I’m in luv with, well you guess it, Comment Luv. As an avid blogger, I enjoy getting feedback and comments from visitors; it tells me what I’m doing right, what I could do better and of course, comments provide a forum for discussion and the voicing of ideas.

I like to give back to frequent visitors and fellow bloggers that contribute meaningfully to discussions on topics; those visitors that I find the most witty and interesting I’ll including in my blog’s blogroll as a way of saying, “right on man, you rock.”

Comment Luv is a plugin that helps me give back a little to the bloggers that comment on my website by adding a little link to the bottom of their comment with their last blog post. Pretty exciting, huh? Here’s a snapshot of Comment Luv in action (courtesy of Comluv.com):

I definitely don’t think Comment Luv should be used as a means of enticing visitors to comment on your blog, but I do think that a good comment deserves some link love. Here’s a look at the Comment Luv back end:

If you get a chance, check this bad-boy out; Here’s a link to where you can download and install the plugin on your own blog: http://comluv.com/download/commentluv-wordpress/.

Another plugin from Comment Luv distributes is Twitter Link; now I haven’t yet jumped on the bandwagon on this one, but it allows the visitor to merely enter their Twitter user name and, lo and behold, their latest tweets show up below their comment. Sound cool? Check it out here: http://comluv.com/download/twitterlink-comments/. Here’s a look at Twitter Link in action:

A great way to keep discussion going on a WordPress post is to separate comments and pings – have trackbacks and pingbacks in their own separate area, and allow comments to flow uninterrupted. Here’s a great plugin that can automatically do this for you without having to jump into your template’s source code: http://urbangiraffe.com/plugins/separate-comment-pings/.

Hope the above plugins provide some help to all those bloggers out there!

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!

The BIG change in v2 is that the plugin now supports loading data on both neighborhood AND zip code level. To see an example, take a look at the Belltown neighborhood in Seattle, WA. The module was previously limited to just being able to display data on a city level. You can add your own descriptions (including HTML now) for each city, neighborhood, and zip code that you set up. You can still also link to cities, neighborhoods, and zips that you haven’t set up / added descriptions for.

Another great new feature is the addition of more market data in the “Market Statistics” module. Data such as the median list price, median sale price, median list price per sq ft, and the number of homes for sale has been added. More data will likely be available in the very near future.

Other changes include usability improvements in the admin area, the ability to turn the Flickr panel off independently of turning off the area descriptions, and the ability to turn off the “Schools” and “Market Statistics” modules.

Anyway, please give it a whirl. You can download the zip file here. If you don’t have Local Market Explorer installed at all, you should be able to simply download the plugin and install it via the plugin upload area in your admin. If you already have Local Market Explorer installed, you’ll need to follow the steps below to upgrade for now (since it’s not officially released yet):

1. Deactivate the Local Market Explorer plugin.
2. Go to the “Recently Active” plugins link.
3. Click the “Delete” link on the plugin to delete all of the files for the plugin. You won’t lose your settings as they’re stored in the database, not in the files.
4. Install the plugin using the plugin “Upload” link.
5. Activate the plugin.

That’s all! It’d be really great to get feedback before this thing is officially released, so if you have anything to say, bugs you found, features you’d like to see, etc, feel free to leave it in the comments.

Sidebar Countdown Plug-in – There are a lot of opportunities to use a countdown plug-in on your site. First, you can use it to create urgency as home buyers visit your website and see the $8,000 home buying tax credit slipping away second-by-second (See an example here, right sidebar).

Another great option would be to use it as a countdown to your upcoming home buying seminar or to track how much time is left for a once-in-a-lifetime builder sale.

Next up, this breadcrumb navigation plug-in saved my website theme’s butt by adding a breadcrumb trail to the top of every page and post on my website. A breadcrumb navigation is basically a virtual trail listed at the top of every page showing you the hierarchy of the page you’re currently on.

So, for example, if a user is browsing my Brighton Green community profile they will see a trail showing how far in that page is from the homepage and what that page’s parents are.

Here’s a visual example of what a breadcrumb navigation element looks like:

Based on the above example my homepage leads to an Orange County, NY page which houses a town page for Newburgh. The Newburgh town page serves as the parent of my Brighton Green community profile. Now a user can click back to any one of those pages without having to use the ‘Back’ button every time. This greatly improves your website’s usability as shown in the community profile page above.

Here’s how to get that effect with one plug-in:

Breadcrumb NavXT – This plug-in does require some template edits but following the guide on the author’s website makes for a very quick and easy install. This plug-in alone will dramatically improve the usability/navigation of your site.

Do you have any must have WordPress plug-ins you would add to the list? Let me know about them in the comments below or on Twitter!

[via Property Portal Watch]

Implementation Examples:

• Phoenix Real Estate Guy (look in lower right)
• Tucson’s #1 FHA Mortgage Loan Source (in the foreclosure listings tab)
• FHA Mortgage Blog (in the foreclosure listings tab)