Over the past few years SEO has developed far beyond traditional search. Users of the search engines can now use universal search to search for the following:

• Video
• Images
• News
• Blogs
• Forums
• And more…

Videos will always attract users as they are more appealing to view than traditional adverts. The search engines have quickly caught onto this allowing users to search a huge selections of videos on sites such as YouTube.

One of the main things to think about when deciding to use video as a form of marketing is where to host the video itself. Traditional it is more efficient to host content on your own site as this builds up your site, and provides more search terms for users to reach the site. Video however is generally hosted on third party websites such as Youtube, mainly due to the technical reasons of hosting video. Users also host videos on Youtube due to its popularity and reach, Youtube is now in fact the 2nd biggest search engine.

In more recent times however websites have become more powerful, making it easier to host the video on your site itself. Most people however will still host their video on Youtube as they will make more money per view than they would on their own site.

A good idea is to promote the video on your site and third party video websites, that way you get both of the benefits including links to your video on both Youtube and your site. One great way to get your video on as many third party sites as possible is to use a video syndication services such as Tubemogul which will sent your video to a selection of third party websites.

But what ranking factors are used for videos
Like natural search Youtube uses a selection of ranking factors including title, description, tags, views, ratings, how many times it has been embedded, comments, age, subscribers and inbound links

One way to get Google to index the video on your site is to use a Video Sitemap, video sites are like traditional XML sitemaps, it is a sitemap of the locations of your videos. The video sitemap protocol also allows you to specify a thumbnail image which can appear in the search results. Once you have completed the video sitemap you should upload it to Google Webmaster Tools as usual, you should also reference the sitemap in the robots.txt file

To help your video rank better in the search results it is still best practice to include some text description of the video next to it. Google’s algorithm still heavily relies on text, so including some relevant text can only help your chances of listing.