Zoomf Blog - UK Property Blog.

It’s been a long time since we’ve talked technical here on the Zoomf blog, and it’s something that hasn’t gone unnoticed by the brainboxes on the team. Because let’s face it, Zoomf is a technology company run by computer wizards, it seems only right that once in a while we forget about all things property and get ourselves excited with codes, plugins and filters.

So I will now hand over to Richard, who will take you through some of the programming changes that have been going on lately. Richard promises to make these updates a regular affair, and you can read his musings on all things tech at his very own blog here.
You may have noticed a few changes at zoomf lately. Over the last month or so the entire site has been given a face lift, that much is obvious. What is not so obvious are some of the less visible new features, such as GeoRss, Kml, better tag filtering, better sorting, better content and Opensearch plugins.

• GeoRss - GeoRss is best described on the Wikipedia page here. Basically we now put location data into our RSS feeds, which can be used by all sorts of different applications, the most useful of which is Google Maps. If you paste any GeoRss enabled feed into the google maps search box it will instantly display the contents of that feed in the map. Check out my home town here. For anyone thats interested we also tag our RSS feed with photos using the Media RSS extensions.

• KML - Again its probably best to look on wikipedia. KML is the markup used by Google Earth, and many other applications such as Google Maps. You can either download the kml and open it with google earth, or paste the kml url into the google maps search bar (as with the rss url) to view the results either Google Earth or Google Maps respectively.

• Better tag filtering - The tag filtering (eg garden, Victorian) now works as an OR query rather than an AND query as before. We felt this gave a better user experience as people can now search for properties on either the 1st or 2nd floor, which was previously impossible.

• Better sorting - You can now sort by price, number of bedrooms and freshness, both ascending and descending.

• Better content - Using the Geonames.org wikipedia web service we display a random wikipedia article based within 10km of your current search area on every zoomf results page. Check out my hometown results page and you will see wikipedia entries for such interesting places as Creswell Crags and Bolsover Castle. The webservice itself is straightforwards to implement and our thanks go to the people at Geonames.org for providing it free of charge.

• Opensearch plugins - Opensearch is yet again best described by wikipedia, however all you really need to know is that it lets users of firefox and internet explorer 7 (and do a zoomf search from their browser. For Firefox users, all you do is go to any zoomf page and click on the search engine selector icon in the top right corner (it probably has a big google ‘G’ in it), then click on ‘add Zoomf.com sales’ or ‘add Zoomf.com’ lets in the drop down bar. We even support search suggestions like Google does. More details of how to do this will be posted to the main zoomf site as soon as we get chance.

Thats it for now, expect another geeky zoomf tech update when we bring back improved visual search in the next few weeks.

Thanks Richard, I think I need a cold shower to get over that blog post

Technorati Tags: Zoomf, Opensearch, kml, georss, google maps

According to an estate agent I spoke to recently, the last thing we need is “another property portal.” I guess what has yet to become apparent is the difference between a property portal and a search engine. Over the coming months I’m sure the answer will begin to emerge for both agents and consumers. That said, looks like Rupert Murdoch is sold on the idea of vertical search. Yesterday they announced the investment in Globrix, which is bringing a ‘google-like’ engine to the property sector in the UK. This is in competition to its own property portal Propertyfinder.com, which can’t be too happy about this. Interesting to say the least. Happy Halloween!

There is a simple and very well known rule of search engine marketing:

Always deep link!

This means that when linking from one place to another you should always maximize your chance of engaging the user. You need to take care of your clicks online. Clicking is a dangerous thing… one extra click and your potential customer is off speaking with your competition. Loyalty? Not online…..

In the search engine marketing world, this is rule 1. Never link to a generic homepage if someone was looking for certain DVD to buy. You are lowering your chance of them buying that DVD.

The same is true of property online. Once a user is engaged with a particular property you have for sale, any click-thru’s need to go directly thru to the correct landing page. Otherwise you force the user to start their search all over again on your website. That is not good customer care. That is not taking care of the click. It’s amazing that the property portals don’t understand that simple premise and continue to send clicks into the ether. Of course this is only the portals who actually make it easy to click from portal to agent.

Numerous resources on this are strategy are available online including the Godfather of converting clicks, Google.