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engageRE is a trademark of real.leads, inc. LeadStreet is a registered trademark of RE/MAX, LLC. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners

Home > By Audience > Region Specific Articles > Mid-states Dixie Region > WordPress

Adding the Explore Places Row to Your Homepage

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One major benefit of a WordPress Premier website is your ability to create and display easy-to-use community searches that help your visitors search quickly for properties by area or type.

You may have noticed that many sites have an area for displaying searches that looks like this:

EPTL-Row

This is called the Explore Places to Live widget, and it is populated with SEO searches.

If you do not have one already on your homepage and would like one, the process is pretty simple:

1. Identify up to 12 SEO searches that you would like to feature.  You should see your existing searches listed out on your Explore Places to Live page, found in your menu at the top of your website.

EPTL Menu Item

If you do not see an Explore Places to Live page in your menu, you probably do not have any SEO searches.  In this case, you'll need to start by creating some with SEO Presto.  Be sure to pay close attention to our tips on how to name your searches.

2. Contact us at premier@engageremarketing.com to request that we add the Explore Places to Live widget to your homepage.  Be sure to list out your 12 searches.

Note: The widget uses a featured image for each search.  If you do not provide us with your own images, we'll use stock photos of our choosing.

There are many sources available for finding images to use on your site.  Unsplash and Pexels are great sources of free images, and there are always paid sites like Shutterstock and iStock.  You are also welcome to choose images from our gallery.  Whatever you submit should be usable at dimensions of 300 pixels by 200 pixels.

To make things easier, you can submit new images to us using the Submit a Photo, PDF, or File form.

Related Articles:

SEO Presto

Images Made Simple: Conquering Photo Management for Your Website (Webinar)

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During this one hour webinar, we discuss image management. Some of the topics reviewed include: image file types, free cropping tools, best-case image practices, and free/low cost image resources. We also demonstrate how to crop/resize a photo using a Mac computer and a free online photo management website.

In this supplemental video, we demonstrate the process of cropping/resizing a photo using Paint 3D, which is available to Windows 10 users.

Download webinar handout.

Correcting Issues When Sharing Listings On Facebook

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What Causes The Problem?

Have you shared your listing on Facebook only to realize the auto-populated information is not what you expected? Similar to browser cache, Facebook also stores a copy of each shared webpage on their own servers (for efficency).

Unnamed image (6)

That means that once Facebook "remembers" a webpage, it will often use this image when you share that same URL. Unfortunately, since listing information is often changing, that cached information may not represent the most current and accurate listing data. Some symptoms you might experience:

  1. A new listing isn’t showing any data or is only showing the description with no photos.
  2. You’ve added new listing photos, but when you share the listing to Facebook, the thumbnail contains an old image.
  3. You’ve updated your listing description, but the old information displays on the thumbnail page when you share to Facebook.

What To Do About It

Fortunately, there is a way to force Facebook to refresh its cache for a listing by using their Sharing Debugger tool.

Do the following:

  1. Go to http://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug/.
  2. Enter the listing URL into the field and click on Debug.
  3. This will bring up a screen of information that tells you when the last page was last scraped. Click on Scrape Again.

Now when you share the listing on Facebook, it should reflect all of the latest information.

Note: Every listing has two URLs available, and these are listed on the Detail page of the engageRE Agent Portal. You may need to repeat these steps for both URLs.

Making Your Website Secure

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Recently in trade press, the question of whether websites should be made secure (all exchanged information encrypted) is being asked.

Converting a website to use secure (SSL) transport requires two steps:

  1. An "SSL certificate" must be purchased for each domain associated with the site. Certificates that can do that typically cost (upwards of $70/year or more) and must be continuously maintained/renewed. That cost, both in terms of dollars and administrative oversight, would have be born by each individual website owner.
  2. The underlying platforms (engageRE & LeadStreet in this case) would have to be modified to support SSL. This would require significant development effort to offer this as an individual option across the several thousand websites hosted by engageRE.

Based on what we know at this time (one article here), Google's policy shift to start giving a "minor ranking boost" to websites that provide secure transport, would not justify either of those investments. It appears to be more of a social legislation play ("...making the web safer for all of us...") because it is only a "lightweight signal" gain in terms of SEO.

We therefore conclude that the highly competitive nature of SEO ranking on real estate keywords would not be materially impacted by adopting SSL on an engageRE/LeadStreet website.

All that said, consumer attitudes as it relates to privacy is an important component of our solution. Should the need for SSL become a key factor in influencing consumer behavior, this will certainly be revisited.

Getting The Most From WordPress Premier (webinar)

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 NOTE: This article applies ONLY To:

In this webinar, we reviewed some of the services that a WordPress Premier subscriber can utilize to build their online presence. Topics include:

  • Premier Support
  • SEO Presto!
  • WordPress Analytics
  • Doing Things Yourself

Additional Resources

More information on the topics discussed in this webinar can be found in these articles:

See this index for full list of WordPress articles

© Copyright 2017 real.leads, inc.

engageRE is a trademark of real.leads, inc. LeadStreet is a registered trademark of RE/MAX, LLC. Other trademarks are the property of their respective owners