Schema.org for real estate portal

[seo-cat]

I am looking for advise on how to best start adopting schema.org for a real estate portal.

Would like to get feedback and suggestions on my initial thoughts.

Here are the obvious ones:

1. http://www.schema.org/RealEstateAgent(Thing > Organization > LocalBusiness > RealEstateAgent) Plan to use this to wrap realtors' information.We ll start with their profile page but possibly also on other pages with their information (e.g. listing page) 2. http://www.schema.org/SearchResultsPage(Thing > CreativeWork > WebPage > SearchResultsPage) This will mark search results pages where e.g. multiple listings of certain type in certain area are presented. 3. http://schema.org/WebPage(Thing > CreativeWork > WebPage) Pretty generic so we are thinking of using it on every page. e.g. significantLinks and breadcrumb objects seem like they could help in marking important links that will help search engines understand the site's information architecture better.

I am not sure how to treat property listings Offer seems a good fit (http://www.schema.org/Offer) but not perfect. maybe it should be combined with place (http://www.schema.org/Place) http://www.schema.org/GeoCoordinates could also be used to mark each listing's location on the map.

any thoughts or experiences you would like to share?

[dohertyjf]

Hi -

The first three seem to make sense to me. If I were you, I would treat Property Listings like a Place. Place also has GeoCoordinates as an Itemprop, so you can mark up the location from within that Schema as well.

Depending on what kind of property it is, you could also use the Thing > Place > Residence Schema for certain parts. It's a bit more specific than Place.

Hope this helps a bit!

[Runner2009]

I've experimented with - and pushed the limits - with rich snippets. When they do work, they were the single biggest factor in increasing CTR , I've ever used.

As you noted, the first thing and easiest would be to itemscope itemptype your business with the real estate agent classification and then add your address etc. all the basics. ( you can use your logo as a business image ). Maybe this helps in Local search, but it is difficult to tell. But it can't hurt and it is easy to do by simply wrapping the itemscope itemptype pointing to real estate sales agent in the HTML tag.

Now the following are just tactics

My next focus would be setting up the authorship verification so that I could get my picture in the SERPS.

Second, I would code my breadcrumbs - in the past I've found that the schema.org metadata doesn't work as well as the other formats. Download Yoasts Wordpress SEO plugin and look how he formats his breadcrumbs. His way works - you can mix types on a site without problems.

Since your homepage doesn't typically have breadcrumbs, make some, these will show up as a mini menu, remember that in the SERPs the breadrcrumbs will show from right to left - truncating the left side items first, put your your most important link at the left to always show up in the SERPs

Every site that I've wanted or didn't want shows breadcrumbs on almost every page.

Images and video objects seem right now at least to work just as well with sitemaps and descriptive alt and title content and I would not waste my time adding the schema info.

There are some others that work well still but perhaps not right for a real estate site.

Last but not least, I would not waste my time coding up the addresses etc for the MLS real estate listings as they are IMO just a mass of duplicate content across the web. Think about it, why would you trust a geo coordinates more than just a simple address?

I'd focus on the neighborhood landing pages - perhaps making them quasi blog posts so that I could get use of the authorship pic.

Then  make the property pages templates more appealing, ones that t will convert by moving away from the standard MLS format.

The frustrating thing about schema.org and the other formats is that when they work one day and then they are gone the next. Your CTRs increase when they are working , but testing and coding takes time as they testing tool has bugs and information on the web and examples can be outdated or just plain wrong.

As for whether it helps with rankings, I'm not sure and my gut feeling is that right now they are not a highly rated signal in the algo if at all, but as I said before, the rich snippet portion if and when it shows up in the SERPs dramatically increases CRT

Lastly and most important, it is my opinion, that, based upon your post, you are granulating the process too much. Basically making it too complicated - as I believe John from Distilled pointed it out. This tendency to overcomplicated the scehma.org info is perhaps  the reason this data is not a stronger signal yet nor been adopted widely.

As you stated, just keep the top level real estate sales agent as your top level, forget about the offerings, WebPage, SearchResultsPage,  etc, next if you have a blog as part of your site add the authorship.

You can then focus on the itemproperties ie NAP and breadcrumbs, etc. Best to keep it simple for now.

If you need some up-to-date info about this check out John Mueller on Google + http://goo.gl/Ow7jI  He always answers questions directly and has been a big help to me and others

[kasqo2004]

Hi John Doherty,

I know this page is very since 2011, but I was wondering if you or any other person could help me out with the right schema for  meQasa's real estate developers page. Will be greatly appreciated.