We all agree that having a video on your webpage is a great way to engage your visitors and to gain some 'page stickiness'. When it comes to hosting online videos, there are a plenty of
high-quality options, both free and pay. YouTube, Vimeo, Brightcove and
TinyPic are just a few of the many video hosts that allow you to upload
your latest video to their servers and allow you to unobtrusively embed
the videos in your website. This solution to video hosting is
convenient and cost-effective, since the cost is free and eliminates the
cost of building a video player and hosting it on a server. What is not always clear, is that search engines won't index anything more than the video's URL. True, you will get the benefit of a visitor staying on the page longer because they are viewing your video, however without some further SEO tactics, you won't get anything more than that.
The challenge with SEO is that getting those embedded videos to rank their associated website high in search engines is a difficult task. Search engines are constantly updating and changing search algorithm rules to thwart “black hat” SEO marketers who don’t play by the rules of SEO. Typical website SEO is generally text-driven, but since videos lack any text, they are quite difficult for marketers to optimize for search engines.
To get search results with your embedded videos and drive traffic to your website you should submit a “video sitemap” to search engines. This small .xml file includes information about your video that provides information about the video such as “title, description, the page the video is on, the location of the content and a thumbnail of the video.” It is also advisable to put a transcript of the video in the description of the video in order to hit the highest number of relevant keywords.