Although using video for content and as part of your SEO strategy is not essential, if you do use it, what is essential is optimising it properly, otherwise, all your efforts are wasted. What this means is simply creating videos and posting them on your website, or major video search engines like YouTube is not enough. You need to do it strategically and effectively.
We mention YouTube because not only are they the largest video site online, they are the second largest search engine of any type, after Google. The latter of those facts takes on even greater significance when you consider that YouTube is owned by Google. This should make it clear that if you want your videos to help boost the SEO and ranking of your website, YouTube is the place to focus on.
The first thing you need to do is the same as you would when considering creating any type of content, and that is keyword research. The easiest way to do this is with keyword research tools that will provide you with a plethora of keywords and keyword phrases.
A further tactic to employ in relation to keywords is to analyse those videos which your competitors have already posted on YouTube. One way to do so is by installing a browser plugin which will produce a list of all the video tags, aka keywords, that any competitor video on YouTube is being optimised for.