MLS Listing Websites

If you are a real estate agent, you need to get Idaho MLS listings on your website. But how do you do that? It's easier said than done.

Most companies that host MLS listings for Realtors use either frames, Flash, or Javascript. This either places your MLS listings on someone else's website (the company hosting the database), or makes your listings completely invisible to search engine traffic.

These approachs are horrible for search engine optimization for several reasons:

• All the traffic goes to the domain of your MLS hosting company. For maximum search engine visibility, you want as much traffic as possible to go to your own real estate website domain.
• Frame navigation can be ugly and awkward. Not every browser supports frames, and they don't all support them equally. They might look fine in one browser, and ugly in another.
• Search engines have trouble indexing framed sites because they are actually several pages blended together.
• Search engines don't follow Javascript links at all, making them useless for gaining search engine visibility.
• They also cannot index Flash sites, because Flash presentations are more like a movie than a collection of targeted pages.
• Needless to say, if Realtor websites can't be indexed easily, they will not rank well.

Frameless IDX/MLS Listings

One solution is Frameless IDX/MLS Listings hosted on your own domain. I specialize in designing search engine friendly websites for real estate agents using this technology. With this approach, your visitors can search the entire Idaho MLS right on your site using your own domain. Your content website will be something like www.yoursite.com, while your MLS search will be something like mls.yoursite.com or idx.yoursite.com.

Visitors will never again have to leave your domain to go to your MLS hosting company website to search for Idaho real estate.

Hosting your own property listings

Another popular property listing solution for real estate websites is to host only your own listings or only those from your brokerage office. This is a solution like the one you find on this site, and can be highly customized. I can set up a property listing system just like this one on your own website, so you or your agents can log in, create a profile complete with photos and logos, and start adding property listings to it.

This is excellent for keeping home buyers on your own site looking at your own company's listings. Leads can be set up to come to your main office, or to individual agents. And the best part is that it's completely search engine friendly. You have complete control over the listings and how they fit into the look and feel of your site without sacrificing search engine visibility.

If you'd like a proposal for how I can get your real estate website climbing up the search engine rankings, please contact me.

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