“Smart” Pages with Custom Layout and Content

What are “Smart” Pages?

Much of this site’s content and certain page structures are automatically generated by custom php coding that uses WordPress “custom fields” extensively. The custom fields provide city names, zip codes, property types and other key information used by the php logic to build pages with standard html layouts, lots of special SEO friendly heading tags, hyperlinks for IDX/RETS searches and to other pages on the site, and in some cases, even some of a page’s textual content. This allows the site to provide a wealth of information to the end user in a very standardized and easy to modify way. This technique also frees content writers from having to be concerned about basic page layout html and styling, and rigidly enforces site-wide design standards.

Types of Smart Pages

Some of the pages that take advantage of this technique include:

  • “About” city pages (Example) have standard heading tags and layout, on page links to the various sections of content, and include blocks of applicable content into the page in the appropriate places. Even custom text is created by content writers as custom fields with standard names, but are otherwise free form at the discretion of the content writer(s).
  • Community / Property type pages (Example) have a standardized page layout, which includes textual content at the top of the page, sections with special hyperlinks to custom IDX/RETS searches by zip code, price ranges and for special property sub-types for that particular page, and automated inclusion of IDX/RETS summary search results html file for that community and property type. This page actually creates 25 to 30 more SE crawl-able pages applicable to that community and property type, multiplying its SEO values immensely!
  • Subdivision pages (Example) also have standard heading tags and layout, including predefined content block locations and automated inclusion of IDX/RETS summary search results for that subdivision. By including custom fields for the entrance address (using street intersections) and latitude and longitude, subdivision pages also utilize a special version of the php code from the “Simple Real Estate” plugin that I adapted to generate demographic information about that subdivision, including nearby schools, real estate market statistics, walk score information and nearby businesses. This makes building new subdivision pages with lots of SEO friendly content very quick and easy.
  • Featured Listings pages consist of three parts:
    • A featured listings index page (Example) that lists all office listings by including summary search results html file generated daily by a custom UIDX search. This can also be set up to be a list of specific listings by MLS numbers from the IDX feed, even if they are not office listings, since all MLS required elements and disclosures are included.
    • A complete property details page for each featured listing (click on any listing in the listings index example page), which is also generated by a daily UIDX custom search. If the property is not an office listing, then all required MLS/IDX elements and disclosures are also included in the listing details. If it is an office listing, then full listing broker/agent contact details are included.
    • A set of property summary snippets, also generated by UIDX search results, one for each featured listing, that can be included in any sidebar or other WordPress widget location. Since these snippets can be independently generated, and the property detail links go to the normal IDX pages, they can also be random listings meeting specified search criteria, such as a particular town or subdivision.

Smart SEO Helper

On each of the above smart page types, if the page is new and does not already have a manually created meta title attribute, indicated by the presence of the “title” custom field for that page, then the custom php code in the admin page will automatically create predetermined meta content for title, description and keywords, based on the custom fields present in that page and the site owner’s preferences. The meta content is then be stored as meta content custom fields by the php code, and used by the SEO plugin. Once the title meta and its custom field have been created and saved, the meta content will no longer be dynamically generated, reducing run time page load overhead. This enforces minimum SEO standards for the site, but also allows some latitude for changes. After the suggested content is pasted into each of the SEO plugin’s meta content fields and the page is published, it can be manually modified if required, using the functionality of the SEO plugin..

Standardization Requirements

Because the custom php code builds lots of intrasite hyperlinks, many parts of the site’s basic technical design need to be standardized. This is actually a very good thing, as it reduces initial and ongoing site content development time and costs, and it enforces the site technical structures and design!

  • Page url structures are standardized, including use of special high lever folder names for certain page types, IDX/RETS search results repository, and other link structures. These can be customized to some extent on a site by site basis, but must always be consistent within any one website. Because of the standardization, site urls can be built that are both SEO friendly and user readable.
  • The WordPress custom fields used by the php coding are standardized, and most are reused across several “smart” page types.
  • The file names of the automatically included IDX/RETS summary search results must be constructed in a standardized way.

Other Smart Content

Some of the SEO benefits from this approach are a result of inherent technical capabilities of the vendor’s IDX/RETS product, including:

The vendor was willing and able to create custom server scripts that build small files containing fully constructed html with summary property search results that are then automatically included in the community / property type and subdivision pages by our custom php code. These scripts run early each morning, after all IDX/RETS downloads and database updates. The html file contents include the most recent listings matching the specified search criteria. Because these are automatically included into the applicable pages, and there are new listings added every day, it appears to the search engines that the on-page content is changing on a daily basis, which is great for SEO, yet no manual intervention or content updating is required.

Each of the on-page links built by the smart page code for community / property type pages create summary search results pages that have their own unique content. The links also pass variables that allow our custom  code to generate appropriate headings and meta tag content, including customized title, description and keywords meta tags in the page’s “head” section, all of which provide strong SEO benefits.