Today, for the first time, I was actually taken aback by the amount of visual crap on Google results.

Related posts:

1. SEO Randomizer: Save the Value of Your SEO'd Links
2. New Google search results — OneBox is upgraded
3. SEO It! Bookmarklet – Improves Search Results in iPhone & Safari

IDX+ is a project I’ve been working on for months. It was born came out of necessity: a client told me “there is no perfect solution for WordPress real estate websites.” After looking into it, I realized he was right.

IDX+ is the solution to your real estate website’s problems.

The current previous state of WordPress real estate plugins

Realtors who want great SEO, complete IDX results, and customization have been in a tough spot: you either had to:

• list listings individually;
• have all the IDX results on a subdomain;
• or pay tens of thousands of dollars to develop a leased website, then pay through the teeth for minor changes to wording or for features like related properties.

Subdomains divide website value, and adding listings individually is often against MLS regulations and isn’t feasible for a large brokerage. Paying tens of

As a result, real estate agents and brokers had to have two websites: one site to get traffic, and the other site to convert the lead.

The best available real estate plugin is great…

The best WordPress plugin for getting site traffic is the dsIDXpress plugin by Diverse Solutions. It offers fully indexable IDX content, great URL re-writing, Google Maps integration, lead forms, and more.

Diverse Solutions got it mostly right–for getting indexed by search engines. dsIDXpress is an SEO powerhouse, but it’s not a one-stop-shop.

…but not perfect.

Your site can get tons of traffic with dsIDXpress — and now there’s a way to convert the traffic into leads.

dsIDXpress downsides:

• No user registration
• No saved searches / favorite listings
• Lots of user dead-ends (for example: once listings expire, they’re gone, leaving 404 error pages)
• Not customizable

IDX+ = the best WordPress IDX solution.

IDX+ builds on top of dsIDXpress to create an amazing platform

dsIDXpress is the foundation for IDX+ and is required to use the plugin. IDX+ plus dsIDXpress makes an amazing package.

IDX+ adds tons of features, including:

• Beautiful user registration – either forced or optional
• User/lead data – including every listing a user views, all searches performed, saved favorites, saved searches, last login, number of logins, and more.
• Favorite Listings & Saved Searches
• Totally customizable SEO title tags for listings or search results
• SEO-friendly redirects for expired listings (redirect to the listing’s city or ZIP with a message to the user)
• Hundreds of customizations – either “install and forget it,” or tweak the settings.
• Related Properties – even choose the search radius and +/- price spreads!
• Related Articles - You’ve blogged a ton; start reaping the benefits.
• Completely template-based: customize the HTML, PHP, CSS to your heart’s delight!
• Developer-friendly: WordPress actions and filters abound.

There are hundreds of features for one flat price – the beta version of the plugin is $599. All purchases of the beta will have free upgrades and support for one year.

Buy the plugin today – beta pricing of $599

Learn more on IDXPlus.net

Related posts:

1. WordPress Real Estate Plugin: Stay Tuned…
2. Building a Real Estate Website in WordPress – Part 1
3. Creating a Real Estate Website in WordPress — Part 2

I have put the BoulderSEO.com domain up for auction: with the upcoming release of the top-secret WordPress real estate plugin, I have chosen to sell this prime property.

The BoulderSEO.com auction will be ending in 18 hours, so if you’re into Colorado, Denver, Loveland, or Boulder SEO (you get the idea!), check out this auction.

You will instantly rank well with this great domain.

Currently priced at only $660 – it’s a great deal! With literally no work done on the site since April, 2009, I still get 1-2 leads/month from this site. This domain will pay for itself in a month.

Go to the auction.

Related posts:

1. SEODenver.com is new home of Denver Web Design & SEO Blog
2. Denver Performance-Based SEO plans

WordPress + Real Estate + User Data + SEO

In the past, I’ve written posts about how to optimize your WordPress real estate website for SEO and I’ve created a Trulia plugin for WordPress.

This WordPress real estate plugin changes the game of what you can do with your WordPress website — and for how much money. No longer do you need to pay tens of thousands of dollars for an indexed IDX solution.

Next week I will release a beta version, so stay tuned for the formal announcement.

Related posts:

1. Introducing IDX+, WordPress Real Estate & IDX Done Right
2. Building a Real Estate Website in WordPress – Part 1
3. Creating a Real Estate Website in WordPress — Part 2

RAMP allows you to make all the changes you need in your staging environment, then selectively push these changes to your production site. You can set up a new section of your site, upload some images to fill out a nice carousel for it, and add a link to it on your home page. Once this content has been reviewed and approved, you can go to your RAMP page, select these content changes, and push them to your production site.

via Easy Content Deployment for WordPress: RAMP.

This would be really handy for larger WordPress sites.

No related posts.

Some of the downsides of using link shorteners are:

1. Google Analytics doesn’t always capture the original referrer (and I have no clue how they do the rest of the time!).
2. When generating links using the bookmarklet (or in this case, also the Yourls installation), there’s no easy way to add campaign, source, medium, content, and term tags for Google Analytics to track.
3. Yourls doesn’t allow query strings on URLs by default, making overriding existing campaign tags difficult/impossible. For example: http://katz.si/t?utm_source=2300

I’m not the only one who wanted these things, so I’ve created a plugin that adds Google Analytics tracking to Yourls. It’s very cool.

Google Analytics Yourls plugin

Download Google Analytics for YOURLS from Github

The plugin features include:

Define default tracking tags
You can define a set of default tags that are added to any link that gets shortened.

• utm_source
• utm_medium
• utm_name
• utm_term
• utm_content

Override existing tags - you can choose to have your tags replace tags in the long URL that’s being shortened…or not.

Tagging options added directly to the URL form – the best feature in my opinion, you now have an interface to easily add tracking right from the link shortener.

Add query strings to the shortened URL to override or add any tracking tags. This feature has support for abbreviations, too.

If you want to see this in action, check out the links below.

• http://katz.si/t?src=tw expands to http://www.seodenver.com/yourls-url-shortener/?utm_source=twitter
• http://katz.si/t?med=em expands to http://www.seodenver.com/yourls-url-shortener/?utm_medium=email
• http://katz.si/t?med=blog&src=seodenver&cam=2300 expands to http://www.seodenver.com/yourls-url-shortener/?utm_medium=blog&utm_source=seodenver&utm_campaign=2300

Plugin Installation

To install, follow these steps:

1. Download the file (updated to correct Github link)
2. Upload the google-analytics folder into your users > plugins directory
3. Go to your YOURLS plugins page
4. Hover over Google Analytics, click “Activate”
5. Configure the plugin settings by clicking the Google Analytics link in the menu

Related posts:

1. YOURLS URL Shortener
2. Export Bit.ly Link Data as CSV
3. Show Content Only Plugin – A Perfect Keyword Research Companion

• Good statistics that are visible only to administrators
• Edit the long URLs after generating shortened links

…but not one service has both features:

• http://sn.im has editable URLs, a bookmarklet, but no stats. Oh, and they kept on deleting my links.
• http://bit.ly has great stats, name recognition, but the links aren’t editable and the stats are public.
• http://goo.gl is the fastest service (so they claim), they have good stats (maybe the best, since they include OS & browser information), but they don’t have editable links or private stats.

Other smaller offerings may have had both features, but they also seem unreliable. I wanted control of my links.

Self-hosted Link Shortening with YOURLS

YOURLS has a really nice admin page, including good stats.

Enter YOURLS; a self-hosted link shortening service that is created by two amazing WordPress plugin developers: Lester Chan and Ozh Richard.

They created YOURLS in a WordPress-like fashion, with developer goodies such as hooks (actions and filters) and plugin capabilities, so you can easily modify how the application works.

You can set up YOURLS however you want, including making it a public service, public stats, etc. or making it private.  I set up a YOURLS installation on my new katz.si domain, which was a snap, except for one minor snag caused by HostGator’s security rules.

You do need to be able to set up a database and edit one configuration file, but other than that, super-simple.

They also have a WordPress plugin that links your WP installation with YOURLS, aut0-generates links, and works like a charm.

Don’t Track Logged-In Users in YOURLS

Once it was installed, I became a link-generating fool. I was clicking the links to see how well the redirections work (they work well!), but the test clicks were logged — this pissed me off with bit.ly and other URL shorteners: don’t offer a way to not track logged in users! I have long thought that this is ridiculous.

To make it so that YOURLS doesn’t track logged-in users, it’s a simple two-line update. Find the following lines in yourls-go.php:

// Update click count in main table
$update_clicks = yourls_update_clicks( $keyword );
// Update detailed log for stats
$log_redirect = yourls_log_redirect( $keyword );

and update them to be:

if(yourls_is_valid_user() !== true) { // Begin: Don't log logged-in users
// Update click count in main table
$update_clicks = yourls_update_clicks( $keyword );
// Update detailed log for stats
$log_redirect = yourls_log_redirect( $keyword );
} // End: Don't log logged-in users


Do yourself a favor and check out YOURLS

In all, my experience was rewarding: it was very easy to set up the YOURLS installation, once up I have a very configurable and fun URL shortener. I get to build links to a domain I control, which is nice for SEO.

Related posts:

1. Yourls Google Analytics Link Tagging
2. How to Add www. – or Remove www. – From Your URL
3. Export Bit.ly Link Data as CSV

The +1 Button uses an advanced sprite technique to simulate an animated gif. The animation occurs when hovering over search results with +1 enabled, and the shine moves across the button. (The image to the right is an animated gif I made…)

The +1 Button is not an animated gif, however. It’s a sprite image that moves a background image across the “window” of the button using Javascript. The code, if you care, goes something like this:

onmouseover="window.gbar&&gbar.pw&&gbar.pw.hvr(this,google.time())"

The sprite image Google uses for the +1 button is below:

Pretty neat, huh?

Yeah, the +1 Button animation is pretty neat…
…now turn it off!

Oh goodness gracious, the animation is annoying. After hovering over one search result, it’s obvious how awful the animation is and I want to claw my eyes out with a rusty nail. I wanted to find a way to disable the animation.

Note: To use the code below, you must have a user stylesheet with the code shown added to the file. Here are links that will help you set it an user stylesheet: Safari, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera. Set that up, and then proceed below!

Disable the +1 Button Animation

.esws { background-position: -400px 0px!important; } /* Disables animation of the +1 button */

Hide the +1 Button

.esw { display:none!important; } /* Hides the +1 Button completely */

Improve the +1 Button

I want to use the +1 Button, so I’ve left it enabled. What I’ve done, however, is make the image lighter so it stands out less when you hover over a listing. When you hover over the button, it increases the brightness to 100%. It’s the best of both worlds:

/* Disabled the animation, makes the +1 button lighter yet full brightness on hover */
.esws, .eswh { background-position: -300px 0px!important; }
.eswh:hover { background-position: -400px 0px!important; }

I hope this helps people who love the +1 Button but hate the animation.

Related posts:

1. Google’s Sprite Image is a Thing of Beauty
2. How to prevent your Google background image from fading in slowly.
3. Introducing: the SEO Stylesheet for Safari, Firefox, Opera, and IE

Easily add TruliaMaps to your website!
Add a Trulia maps widget showing homes in your area, without touching any HTML or code. This plugin allows you to configure tons of options; check it out today!

The Trulia real estate plugin includes options for:

• Map size
• Map, Satellite or Hybrid map type
• Slideshow – automatically cycle through houses. Choose how quickly the slideshow displays, or to turn it off.
• Map Background and Text colors

Easily add a real estate map to your page or post using “shortcodes”:

[trulia city="Bethesda" state="MD"]
will show a map for Bethesda, MD real estate.

[trulia zip=90210 rotate=10 size=panorama]

will show a wide map of the 90210 real estate for sale, and will rotate showing listings every 10 seconds.

Shortcode

[trulia title="Boston Real Estate" align=right city=Boston state=MA background="#cccccc" color="#333333" size=large rotate=10]

The plugin has shortcode support with the following setting options:

• size – Choose between large (default), small, and panoramic map sizes.
• title – Modify the text of the map heading.
• zip – Standard ZIP code
• city – Name of the city.
• state – Two-letter state abbreviation.
• rotate – How quickly, in seconds, do you want the listings to auto-rotate. Defaults to 0 (off).
• map_view – Choose between Map (map), Satellite (sat), or Hybrid (hyb) views for the map images.
• align – Align the map to the left, right, center, or none
  Note: uses WordPress CSS classes to achieve aligning; some themes may not support this.
• color – HEX value for map heading text color (#efefef, for example)
• bg - HEX value for map background color (#cccc33, for example)

Please leave support questions/issues and comments below!

This WordPress real estate plugin was made possible with the support of the Koitz Group, Bethesda, MD real estate experts.

Related posts:

1. WordPress Real Estate Plugin: Stay Tuned…
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3. Lottery Results – A New WordPress Plugin

I’m going to tell you a bit about these projects and something I’ve learned from each of them.

Contactified

Integrate Constant Contact with the Shopify shopping cart. A really cool project inspired by the great Chimpified.

What I learned

This was an interesting project to get going because it made clear how, even with a template app, a strong API with decent developer documentation, and experience in PHP coding for WordPress, creating a SaaS application is a lot of work, especially as an one-person development team.

There are lots of items to build from scratch, such as where users will be redirected, how to know which page they came from when they logged in, etc. Lots of this I normally let WordPress take care of, but when building Contactified, I started from scratch. Next time, I think I will build the app on top of WordPress.

HTCTablet.net

HTCTablet.net is a blog / resource for HTC tablets (like the new Flyer). The HTC Tablet site is giving away a HTC Flyer.

I started the HTC Tablet site before the Flyer was launched. There were rumors that HTC was working on a tablet, and I set out to get ranked for the product. I started with the base twentyten WordPress template and wrote some blog articles. The Flyer is now launched, the site is ranked #3 for HTC Tablet and #5 for Buy HTC Flyer.

What I learned

After the tablet was launched, there was no longer speculation; there was reporting, and there was lots of it. I didn’t fully appreciate the amount of work it takes to have a topical tech blog.

Setting up the Flyer giveaway was initially easy because of Gravity Forms – I figured it would be simple to choose a winner from the submitted entries, but didn’t anticipate how hard it would be to collect Twitter and Facebook entries:

• What happens when an user doesn’t follow directions exactly? If the link and hash tag are there, that’s what matters to the contest.
• The contest states post a message on your wall; entrants are posting to HTC Tablet’s Facebook page. I will have to determine what exactly will be done about that!
• Some people submit more than once using every email account they own. These users will be disqualified when the drawing comes. Filtering these people out is manual.

I’ll write more about the HTC Flyer giveaway as the time comes.

WordPress Plugin Support

I have a lot of WordPress plugins that I have authored or am in charge of. The plugins have almost 150,000 downloads to date, and I have dedicated a good portion of my schedule to upgrading and maintaing these plugins.

What I’ve learned

Maintaining free plugins is not a great way to make money. A few users have been very generous with their donations and shown appreciation for support by donating. Donations, however, don’t pay the bills.

I am planning on having free and paid version of plugins, just like with iPhone or iPad apps. Contactified has a free basic plan, but then a $3/month plan. I am planning on adding killer features to some plugins that will take literally hundreds of hours to create…I cannot afford to give these features away.

Charging for plugins is a technical hurdle. There are sites such as WP Plugins that may work for this, but there are a lot of crappy plugins that are charging 10 bucks for one line of code (eg: Remove Admin Bar) and I don’t like that approach.

Plugin documentation is really hard to do well, and very important. Documentation in my plugins is often insufficient for non-technical people. I am going to be creating documentation in the future, but in the mean time, I am helping users troubleshoot issues for free.

Client Work

In addition to the different “side-jobs,” I’m still an SEO and web developer. I have clients to complete projects with, maintain, and support. The “what I’ve learned” from working with clients is far longer than anything I can write on this blog. In short, running your own business and working with clients is a great way to learn about yourself.

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