Best IDX You’re Gonna Get For 2018

I’ve been using this plugin on my website for many, many years, and it’s been working great and getting me about 20-40 leads every month on average. And the plugin works best using the “Markets” feature to create individual shortcodes for every community, neighborhood, city, or county that you want added to your website.

I painstakingly, over the course of 4-6 months, created a page for just about every community in my area. I have nearly 500 “markets” which equates to about 500 neighborhoods that I created in iHomefinder. After creating those markets, I then had to create 500 website pages for each community.

With each page, I included an SEO-friendly page title, SEO-keywords, meta data, and SEO-friendly community description too. Doing this will help get a page indexed by the search engines, in additiona to having the IDX on the pages too. But that indexing will take anywhere from 6 months to two years — providing you also create analytics accounts with Bing and Google to make sure they index your site and pages.

I’m a real estate agent, but I’ve been messing with websites long before I was an agent (since the early 90’s). And I’m just saying there’s a lot more involved with using this plugin than just activating it.

Using an IDX plugin from any provider does not guarantee your site will be found. It will take a lot of work and time, or money. I have more of the former than the later, and the time I devoted into building my website would have cost me tens-of-thousands-of dollars, if not more.

What many users are complaining about is the older IDX page creation that iHomefinder was offering, that more easily created IDX pages. Unfortunately, those IDX pages are not SEO friendly and they would not get indexed by the search engines, ever. So I eventually learned the hard way that I had to create SEO-friendly pages myself for every community in my area, but it paid off years ago.

To see the plugin and my work i action, Google “brighton park condos chesapeake va” and my web page for that community will appear in the 2nd position, and it’s not a pay-per-click page either (it’s the mrtownhome.net website). Also try “homes for sale in ridgely manor virginia beach” using Bing and I appear on the first page in about the 5th or 6th position. And I get this placement for just $59 a month with the iHomefinder IDX plugin.

Trust me, I know iHomefinder isn’t perfect and I’ve had my issues with them too. iHomefinder is real slow with support, even when calling in (support available noon to 8pm EST weekdays only). There’s no forum or open discussion to speak of, and they are slow to update their plugin as WordPress rolls out updates, which has caused some slight problems for me but nothing I couldn’t work through.

In fact, as of 12/17/2018, Optima Express has only been tested up to WP 4.9.9 when WP 5.0.1 is already out, and I think that’s causing some forced sign-up issues with IE and Firefox, but not Chrome.

I tried IDXBroker and what I didn’t like was they did not allow all “sold” listings to be displayed on a web page, only my personally sold listings. But allowing sold listings to be displayed is a must-have, to help keep a web page indexed by search engines… just look at some of the larger brokerages and you’ll see what I mean.

Unfortunately/fortunately, whether you can display sold listings on your website will depend on your local MLS and fortunately, my MLS allows sold properties to be displayed for up to 12 months. And that keeps the leads coming in and the pages indexed in Google and Bing.

I don’t work for iHomefinder and as mentioned, I’ve had my share of issues with them. I’m not getting anything out of providing this Hemingway novel feedback either, but I’ve tried other IDX plugins and this is the best it gets for now.

I was reading through a bunch of negative feedbacks, and I remember not knowing anything about IDX, WordPress, SEO, or plugins. So I’m providing this with the hope to help someone else who may be considering this plugin. I even noticed some negative feedbacks said they would never use this plugin again yet, when I went to their website, the agent is back to using it.

I’m just saying that for the approximate $59 I spend each month, is money well-spent. But you’re just going to have to devote a little time in creating a website that can utilize all of the features this plugin provides, to maximize the results it can and will produce.

• This topic was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by Frank B..
• This topic was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by Frank B..
• This topic was modified 5 years, 11 months ago by Frank B..