Eager to get the most Search Engine Optimization (SEO) out of your Real Estate Website?

    Yes, Duh.

Good point. Well today Virtual Results Members have another reason to celebrate with the release of our new feature, IDX / MLS Listing Sitemaps. You can view a photo here in this blog post. It’s not going to win any beauty contents but that’s OK. Sitemaps are not intended for humans. Rather, a sitemap is a list of all your website content in a format for Google and other search engines to consume. The idea is to make it really simple for search engines to locate and index all your content. That’s important because your content can’t appear in Search Engine results unless Google and other search engines know about that content!

    But haven’t we had website sitemaps for a long time? Why is this a thing?

Yes. However, today’s feature is an additional sitemap dedicated solely to MLS IDX Listings. Did you know the Virtual Results Platform creates a page on your website for every single Active/Pending/Sold listing allowed by the MLS? It’s a powerful feature and the reason why even brand new sites often launch with more than 100,000 pages of content. So let’s do everything we can in order to make sure Google knows about all that great content.

Both sitemaps remain important. The IDX Sitemap does not replace your original sitemap, both should be submitted and verified to search engines. Visit Google.com/webmaster and create an account in order to submit your sitemaps, for example.

How to locate your sitemap:

  • The original website sitemap is located at yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml
  • The IDX sitemap is located yoursite.com/sitemap/yoursite/sitemap_index.xml

Remember you may always contact our fantastic support at [email protected] if you have any questions. Always test your sitemap urls prior to submissions to confirm the pages are loading as expected!