I assume there are many upsides to creating your own real estate IDX solutions, such as:

1. you own the product

2. making changes/updates & hosting fees will be at cost

3. **your competition won’t have your exact IDX

4. you can fix or access your product in a moments notice

Some downsides to creating your own IDX maybe:

1. Upfront Cost to develop a good IDX solution

2. Finding good programmers and designers

3. Having to reinvent the wheel

As I see it, if you have a good real estate IDX provider why reinvent the wheel. While there are significant advantages in creating your own IDX, for the overwhelming majority of Realtors creating their own IDX is not realistic.

We’ve been very pleased with REW’s IDX solution, which also has a great CMS system. Only issue we’ve really faced is the load time for our sites, which seem to be extremly slow currently. However, REW is always quick to addresses our issues and is quick to resolve them.

We’ll be testing out some new IDX solutions in the coming year and we’ll update the products when we’ve had a chance to test them out I’m also hoping to hear from the Realtors that have developed their own solutions.

Update: Looks like We’ll be testing a new IDX sooner than I thought. REW’s new Iframe IDX is ready to launch in January 2010. The new IDX looks like it will have some awesome features too, actually looks better than my custom one.

Check out Morgan’s post here

1. Optimize WordPress Permalinks

Permalinks are very important for SEO purposes as Google gives weight on keywords found within a link. So a search engine friendly permalink structure MUST includes the post title (%postname%) which will eventually contain the keywords related to your page/post. To change your permalink structure, simply go to your WP admin panel, click on the “Permalinks” link under the Settings section, and choose the custom permalinks structure option. Personally I feel having your title on the permalink is good enough, but some may want to put in the category as well. So your ideal permalink structure would be – /%category%/%postname%/

2. Optimize WordPress Post Titles

Changing your permalink structure is not enough if you are not writing good post titles. The post title is the most important part of the blog post for many reasons. From your reader’s perspective, a descriptive and compelling blog post title will help them decide if they really want to read your post or not. From a search engine’s perspective, the title of the post is the primary determinant of what the rest of the content is all about. So you should always think of keywords or phrases people might type into a search engine to find your content and use them organically in your post title.

3. Write a robots.txt file

The robots.txt file is essentially used to instruct a crawler about which pages of your blog should be crawled and indexed and which part should be blocked. There are tons of wordpress blogs out there which doesn’t use a robots.txt file, thus the same content is indexed in the search engine in different ways. So creating a robots.txt file can actually improve your website indexation a lot as in a robots.txt file you can specify your sitemap and also tell the engine which folders/directories you don’t want it to index. The ideal strategy is to have robots.txt file that prevents the engines to index the same content in multiple ways.

4. Optimizing your Meta Tags

Even though many people say that meta tags aren’t important anymore – it’s not entirely true. Majority of the time, a search engine uses your Meta description tag as your search snippet. Having some of your keywords in your Meta description tag can really help you to catch the searchers attention and also can help you to boost your search rankings. For wordpress, using a plug-in like All-in-one-SEO would be very easy way to put unique Meta tags on each of your blog post.

5. Use Sitemaps

Sitemaps is a very simple and straightforward way of submitting all yours URLs to a search engine. Sometimes even a search engine finds it difficult to discover really deep links, thus having a sitemap makes it really easy for the engine to find all those deep pages that you have on your blog. There are some cool wordpress sitemap plugins out there which can really make your job a lot easier by automatically updating your sitemaps as you write new posts.

6. Use Related Posts

I’m sure you have noticed that many blogs nowadays shows a list of related posts at the bottom of every post. Other than having the obvious advantage of increasing the stickiness of your blog, it also has some SEO benefits. Showing related posts on each of your post actually helps you to create a very solid internal link structure throughout your blog, which makes it easier for the search engines to find and index and rank some of your older blog posts.

7. Write link worthy posts

Links from good websites are still one of the most important factors that determine your Google Page Rank which ultimately helps you in your search rankings. If you are not producing quality content, it is not likely for anyone to link to your article / blog post. So you should always write content that you feel is link worthy, even if it takes a bit of extra effort or time from your end.

8. Update your blog frequently

This is probably one of the most overlooked areas when it comes to optimizing a blog. SEO is a very dynamic process, and if you run a blog which you update only once every month then you really shouldn’t expect much from it. Updating your blog frequently and also consistently is very important as the crawler sort of makes it a habit of coming back to your site again and again for fresh content.
SEO is not rocket science! If you follow some of these simple steps you can be rest assured that you are going towards the right direction. Once you see some search traffic coming in your way, you can slowly concentrate on some of the more advanced search engine optimization techniques.

When a buyer is looking for a house, location plays a very essential role, and just like Zillow, Google Maps also puts a house’s location at the front and center of its presentation. Looking at houses on Google Maps, however, makes one thing very clear and that is Google is only aggregating data from listing web sites and getting its data from brokers who update their listing on Google Base. This means that listings on Google Maps are not necessarily as up to date or as comprehensive as those you could find on similar services.
It is also quite obvious that real estate listings aren’t the center concern of Google Maps. Google’s competition usually offers far more options when searching for a house (e.g. type of house, lot size, the year when it was built, etc.), and does a better job at displaying other important information about a house and the neighborhood. It can tell you for instance, the quality of local schools, restaurants, shopping malls and so on.

While it is good to see that Google is re-structuring itself to the real estate market, this is hopefully only the beginning of the company’s efforts, because in its current state, these nifty listings on Google Maps are a nice addition to a great product, but don’t hold up as a real estate offering in its own right.

Should you upgrade to a custom real estate IDX ? Yes!!!

Since we upgraded to a custom REW IDX our leads have increased significantly. The search engine friendly pages are spiderable and have increased long tail traffic to our website.

Previously the only company who provided custom IDX solutions was REW, however there are some new players emerging.

There are only a few custom IDX providers, below are the only three that I’m aware of.

1. REW Custom IDX ( we use this product and recommend it )

2. Real Geeks Custom IDX ( never used this product, but seems strong and will launch in a few months )

3. AMPS211 ( never used this product, but Mike is a great guy and is very honest and ethical . I’m sure once it’s 100% complete it will rock )

We have new sites in the process of going some major redesigns and we’ll most likely incorporate one of the new IDX vendors to test them out Nothing like playing with a new toy.

I’ll update and compare the major differences between the products soon. If you know of any other custom IDXs please comment below and I’ll update the list.

Your real estate website should be designed for the purpose of serving your visitors and clientele.  A website that detracts, annoys, or otherwise confused a visitor does not serve a beneficial purpose.

Here are some great technology ideas that you should avoid on your real estate website:

Pop-Ups

Pop-up windows have become one of the most annoying features of any web technology.  So much, in fact, that most web browsers are designed with an express feature to block pop ups.  Don’t frustrate your audience by trying to be clever with pop-up winder information.

Flash

No, not the superhero or one related to a trench coat.  Flash technology is neat and clever and offers some really interesting options for animation designers and graphical web sites.  But is your real estate about graphic animation?  No.  You are a service provider who’s main goal should be to provide information, not animation.

Keep your real estate website design simple.  Flash technology not only requires the most recent and upgraded web browsers, thus a portion of your audience will be unable to view the site, but it also requires high-speed internet for those who view it.  Your website should be easily accessible for all users.

Too many / Not enough Pictures & Graphics

A real estate website should have a nice balance of textual as well as graphical information.  A website with too much text can be more difficult to read and navigate, whereas a site stuffed with too many photos or graphics can be even harder.

Provide small resolution photos that are relevant to an article.  Use simple graphics for your logo or navigation menu.  And the place to use plenty of photos is in your real estate listings.  Make sure they are clear (not too bright or dark) with good composition of exterior and interior views.

1. HeadSpace 2 – With the HeadSpace plugin you can tag posts, create custom titles and descriptions that improve your sites ranking. Short video below.

2. Property Watch – The property watch plugin creates a form for home buyers to email you their home search criteria. This works great if you do not have an IDX search on your website.

3. RSS Footer - This is a Great plugin by Yoast. This will enable you to get a link back to your original article post if (when) your site gets scraped.

4. Real Estate Theme – This is not necessarily a plugin, however its a great real estate theme by Brian Gardner. If your just starting out and want a web presence, there really is no need to spend 1000s on a website. Not at first anyways .