Video on Website for SEO?

If your hosting with your own host, add a video sitemap to get it indexed & the video thumbnail image in the SERPs.

No matter what anyone else tells you, the video sitemap is how you get the thumbnail image in the SERPs.

I could not agree with "yukon" more. He is dead on!

If you have a choice between YouTube and your own website, always choose your own website. The reason being is there are only a small number of things that you can do to get the attention of the search engines when it is posted on a video portal such as YouTube. Additionally, you do not own the page on which the site is hosted, YouTube does. As you may know, video portals are not yet profitable. In fact, they lose a lot of money. Therefore, you always want to maintain control of your videos.

As yukon said, host your own video, add the image to your sites home page, and add a video sitemap to your website. This is the best option.

Always better to have content close to you. But were I to choose *one* external website to host a video on, YouTube is not bad choice. Also gives you an offsite page to promote to dominate SERPs with more "space".

But yeah, opt for your own site first. Longterm better strategy for all types of content in my opinion.

Not just video on website, video on top video portals distributed out with Keywords, metatags, and the proper optimization for increased visibility.
You should try UBL, we automate those processes for you & distribute out 35 categories including your social networking links, photos, keywords, descriptions, video links, & much more. Beyond our listing syndication (correction, enhancement, & distribution) to 350+ publishing sites, directories, GPS, 411, & navigation- We create a 30 second video & claim your business to Google, Yahoo, Bing, Twitter, 4Sq, & create a FB Fanpage for you. We distribute all information out to the top 10 video portals for a low pricepoint. Check it out at ubl dot org and then click on "see packages now" on the right-hand side. Increasing business visibility is the foundation to improving SEO! We offer social claiming to 100 sites also for rapid SEO results.

Cheers!

What I would do is upload it 1st to YouTube, fill out a keyword rich video description, and include a link not only to your website's homepage, but also to the direct landing page "if the video is not on the homepage" to where the video is on your website. Now, when you have the link pointing to your video on your website, make sure the content is different from the content in the video description, because you don't want Bing, Google, YaHoO!, and other major search engines trying to penalize you for duplicate content, ya know what I'm say'n? They look at that kind of stuff. But yeah, you can place the video from YouTube on your site. Just make sure the content for the YouTube video in the YouTube video description is NOT the same as the content is on your website that shows the same YouTube video. Kapeesh? =)