WPRealty Sites Out Rank Competition

Posted on December 21, 2009
Filed Under General | 2 Comments

After just 11 weeks working round the clock to get WPRealty 2.0 wrapped up we discovered with pleasant surprise that the first users of plugin have increased in rank position by a substantial margin.  Substantial enough that one of our clients was literally dug out of the hole in Google in just a few months. Examining the actual links in Google and the other search engines demonstrate a combination of things that seem to lend a great deal to the SEO prowes of a WordPress empowered real estate website.  The experts tell me that when it comes to SEO its not wise to make statements based on absolutes for the most part. The reasons should be obvious since SEO is every bit an art form as it is a science.  I’ll just run down a quick list of the characteristics I think lend favor to the improvements in rank and position.

WPRealty SEO Benefits!

WPRealty has three primary things going for it; WPRealty integrates well with WordPress taking on its native appeal to search engines, it can be used to add IDX or RETS integration to WordPress real estate websites and it has good clean SEO characteristic that is nearly transparent with WordPress blogs. An additional benefit is low setup and integration initial cost.

The SEO benefit of WPRealty is pretty straight forward when it comes to the actual property listings in part because of the content that can relate to predefined search criteria and listing association. This feature just got a lot better as of version 2.0.5 since we have added in the ability for real estate bloggers to feature listings based on unique presets right in individual posts and pages. This means that you can write posts about various employers, neighborhoods, subdivisions or other topics and feature listings relative to your post.

WPRealty was built for SEO and it was built for real estate websites using WordPress.  Having built hundreds of sites over the years, the same frustrations seems to surface again and again where Realtors suffered from dead end proprietary solution that netted them little or no added benefit in terms of sales leads and conversion.  Having a real estate website should be more than just the opportunity to say you have one. It should produce results. For this reason, most Realtors know they must blog, they have heard of WordPress, they want WordPress and they want to integrate the MLS in a way that is simple to use and market with. Most important, they do not want to wear a pair of handcuffs to get what they are after. WPRealty extends the SEO benefit of WordPress into the listings integration and liberates the real estate professionals from the proprietary prescription of snake oil packages.

What else does WPRealty bring to the table?

We have published this across dozens blogs and forums regarding the motive behind WPRealty and that motive remains unchanged as I’ll explain further.  As an active member and service provider with the UltimateIDX, one of the primary things we identified when UltimateIDX was being built was that Realtors were sick and tired of being locked into a solution providers idea of what leads to success.  Realtors were required to subscribe to a pre-formatted turnkey solution most often inflexible and punitive in nature. Because of this UltimateIDX wanted to free the Realtor to select the website solution of their choice and liking while providing a way to put MLS listings into their site. UltimateIDX went further by adding in both CRM (client resource management) and sales management features for a truly useful and SEO friendly resource.  Real Estate Professionals could now have their cake and eat it too.

With UltimateIDX Realtors were free to use Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, Type Pad, or nearly any other website solution with the MLS integrated in a way where the Realtor could have an effective sales lead management solution and the SEO benefits of user defined URLs for their MLS properties. The UltimateIDX broke the glass ceiling opening the door for real estate professionals to express and explore their own creative marketing methods. Thus WPRealty was built to focus only on WordPress sites by scaling down some of the ideas behind the top end solution and bringing it about with a unique license scheme. I’ll get to the license below in more detail as I explain the versions of WPRealty.

First, for the sake of the following list of features, PSP equates to “Proprietary Solution Provider“. Proprietary Solutions are solutions that are built as a proprietary tool, software, method or other characteristic unique to the provider who offers it. The solution is proprietary of the provider and remains theirs. Thus proprietary solution providers would for instance be companies like Advanced Access, Agent Image, Real Estate Webmasters, Z-57, and the myriad of others offering turnkey real estate website solutions. The following examples DO NOT necessarily apply to the above mentioned companies.

Here is how WPRealty is uniquely different from many assorted PSP’s.

  1. Unlike many PSPs, with WPRealty, the content you write remains yours and you are free to move it anywhere you wish. Many PSP’s maintain ownership of the content you publish and will not often allow you to take your years of blogging and content writing with you if you migrate to another solution. WPRealty frees you from this nonsense.
  2. WPRealty does not harbor or possess your domain name. Many PSP’s will not only register and setup your domain for you, they actually harbor ownership of the domain. Migrating away from those providers most often means losing your domain name even though you may pay an annual fee for registration. With WPRealty, your site is yours even if we register your domain for you.
  3. WPRealty is not an iFramed or sub-domain MLS solution.  Many PSP’s may promise to provide listings directly integrated into your site but in-fact only do so with a framed solution or a sub-domain on their MLS solution. This method has absolutely NO SEO BENEFIT at all to the real estate website owner.  The technique of creating http://mycompany.proprietaryserviceprovider.com has no SEO advantage at all for your listings or your company. With WPRealty your URL’s are structured with http://www.mydomain.com/properties/listing-mls#-user-defined-url/ So if you want your url to be /realestate/listing-85754-west-31-abc-street-seattle-wa/ you can have it.
  4. WPRealty will NEVER PREY ON YOUR LACK OF KNOWLEDGE. There are PSP’s we have encountered during our competitive research that actually told us they would “Guarantee the #1 spot In Google” and that if we purchased their solution we would have a site that would be “Auto SEO Friendly”. Some PSP’s would even go so far as to suggest that an iFramed MLS is SEO Friendly and would be indexed by search engines would deliver the best results. One PSP claims that their turnkey solution would “Guarantee Daily Leads” from their Zillow and Trulia XML export feature.  The simple fact is nothing could be further from the truth.
  5. Template Library with hundreds of templates. Most PSP’s provide the Realtor with a turnkey design that they can quickly employ as part of the site depending on the packages purchased. Although this feature with many PSP’s is an effective solution for creating websites rapidly; changes, modifications and other updates are almost always quite expensive. The number one issue we have encountered with these types of setups is that when the Realtor wishes to move to another solution, they l0ose the look and feel of their site as the themes are proprietary.  With WPRealty you have every possible opportunity to use tens of thousands of WordPress themes where the overwhelming majority are GNU / GPL. There are literally thousands of developers and designers eager to modify your theme to your liking at a fraction of the cost PSP’s would charge.
  6. Worthless Link Farms. With many PSP’s, your entry level solution may often require you to opt into cross linking schemes and link farms. Either one is a truly ineffective and potentially hazardous thing to employ in your site. Realtors rarely link to other Realtors, Google knows it, MSN knows it, Yahoo knows it, the PSP’s know it yet continue to pimp the idea to the naive. This technique benefits one person and one person only, the PSP.
  7. Complex contracts. During our research when we began building our product comparison charts we examined some of the contracts that the PSP’s were asking us to sign as Realtors and we were a bit amazed at the terms.  Many PSP’s will first ask you to accept the fact that they own your site, your content, your design, your images, your contacts and your domain.  Why exactly would we pay a PSP for the privilege of having a site where we own nothing and retain no rights to the hard work and content we produce? WPRealty will leave control in the hands of the one who truly deserves it. YOU!

Before you consider spending thousands upon thousands of dollars on another proprietary solution, please contact us at http://www.wprealty.org for an examination of our solutions and services.  You wont regret it. For more information about the history of WPRealty read this article.

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2 Comments so far
  1. Tony Sena December 27, 2009 11:17 pm

    Hey Jared,

    Sounds like you have a great product. I am going to talk to my partner/developer in the morning and get his take on this plug-in as I would like to try it out and see how it does on my Las Vegas Real Estate site.

    Might be talking to you soon.

  2. Jared Ritchey December 29, 2009 9:38 am

    Tony just call me when you can, you may want to wait for Version 3.0 and I’ll be happy to get you a developers license with no branding. We built this for guys like you who DO NOT want proprietary solutions.


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