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Whether it’s a Ken Burns style slideshow you’ve created yourself (see Tip Tuesday: Creating a Killer Listing Presentation) or a professionally shot and edited production (see WellcomeMat – The Killer App for Real Estate Video), real estate video just got a whole lot more important.

Why? Two words. Universal Search. From Google’s Press Release last week:

Beginning today, the company will incorporate information from a variety of previously separate sources – including videos, images, news, maps, books, and websites – into a single set of results.

The search giant promises it will be rolling out these features soon, but the bottom line is that it looks like relevant videos are going to start populating the organic search results Google returns. Space in those top 10 results just got a whole lot more valuable.

But it’s more than just having a video though. This is going to require having a comprehensive distribution strategy. So far I’ve seen videos from Metacafe, Youtube and Google Video show up in some of search results. I’m not sure how many of the video hosts will ultimately be in there, and there are quite a few to choose from (see my post Real Estate Video Shoot Out for some examples).

Having your real estate videos with as many hosts as possible is going to be the key here. So is keyword tagging and adding descriptive information to each. Video syndication will be the name of the game.

There’s probably a business model somewhere in all of this – someone who can take your video and simultaneously blast it up to numerous different video hosts and make sure it’ll show up in the proper search terms. I know I’d probably pay for someone to do this for me.

For more, read:

• RE Agent in CT » The Google Juice Now Tastes Like Video…
• Yikes! Video Killed The Real Estate Webmaster | The Real Estate Bloggers
• Google Universal Search Will Turn Up Video – Sellsius

Stay tuned, tomorrow for a second part in why Universal Search has changed the game.

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