Title, Dynamic URLs, and Meta Tags can tell visitors and search engines more about each individual IDX property detail page. Since there are potentially thousands of details pages, depending on how many active listings your MLS has, this would be a lot of work to customize the Title, Meta Tags and URL for each page individually. That's where the Dynamic SEO settings in the IDX Control Panel can help. Once the Dynamic SEO settings are in place, the Title, URL, and Meta Tags will automatically change depending on the listing displayed on the page. There are several benefits to adding dynamic URLs, title, and meta tags to your detail pages:
- Less duplicate content provided to search engines. Search engines are more likely to crawl sites that offer unique webpages. If title and meta tags for IDX property description pages are all alike, the search engines will be less likely to crawl each page link.
- More accurate descriptive text for pages that are indexed with search engines. In Google results, the meta description tag provides about 160 characters of descriptive page text. If this text contains the address, city, zip, etc. for the listing on the page, the visitor may be more likely to click through the search result.
By default, IDX Broker does preconfigure these settings to give you a head start. The settings applied upon account creation are as follows:
- Dynamic Details URL
- address - cityName - stateAbrv - zipcode
- Dynamic Title Text
- idxPropType for sale in cityName, state - listing ID
- Dynamic Meta Tags: Description
- remarksConcat
- Dynamic Meta Tags: Keywords
- listingID, address, cityName, state, stateAbrv, zipcode, countyName, listingPrice, idxPropType, propSubType, displayName
To customize Dynamic SEO Settings for Details pages, click Design in the main menu, Website in the submenu, then Page Templates.
Find your Details Page link, and click "Edit" under the Preferences column.
On the Page Preferences screen, click the SEO Settings tab.
Dynamic Details URL
In this first section you can choose how the tail of the URL for Details pages is built. By clicking in the box you'll get a list below it of the optional values to build the URL with. You can also rearrange them by clicking and dragging them left or right.
The line below this box gives the preview of the link as it would appear on a sample Details page.
Dynamic Title Text and Meta Tags
You can add Dynamic tags into your Title or Meta Tags by clicking the Add dynamic tag link on the right of the three fields. You'll get a pop-up box that displays the core options for Dynamic SEO tags:
Clicking on any of these tags will instantly add them to the field you are editing. You can rearrange them by copying and pasting them in a different order. You can also mix plain text into these fields to create unique and relevant content.
Your finished tags might look something like this:
In the example above, for the Dynamic Title Text I used:
{{cityName}} Real Estate {{address}} - Listing {{listingID}} {{displayName}}
When displayed inside a browser on the front-end of your website this may display a title as follows for a specific listing:
Eugene Real Estate 345 Main St - Listing 12345678 - Jane Doe, Principal Broker, ABR, CDPE
The colored text is the dynamic text that was pulled in and displayed automatically though the Dynamic SEO Tags. The text appearing in black is the static text. The Dynamic elements of your Title and Meta Tags will be different on each and every property details page according to the details of the listings themselves.
Once you have set up your Dynamic SEO Tags, you should be able to see them in action by viewing the source code of one of your details pages.
Note: Your Global Wrapper must already contain title, meta keyword, and meta description tags in the <head> section in order to be replaced dynamically. Additionally, these meta tags must not have any line breaks in them. Each element must be its own single continuous line in the HTML.