Part 2: The Good. If posting your brand video to YouTube and then embedding it on your own website is your company’s M.O., you’ll be glad to know that’s a strategy that has now become more SEO friendly. In order to take full advantage of those SEO opportunities, however, you’ll need to take a couple of additional steps that you may have previously overlooked.

You can now create a separate video sitemap and submit it to Google, listing your video content; alternately, you can add video information to your existing sitemap. This is a back-end step that refers to how you markup HTML documents on your website, and one that dramatically improves the chances that Google’s search engine will index your company’s videos.

Here’s the kicker: If you specify where your video is embedded in that sitemap, Google will direct traffic there, rather than to YouTube, where the video is hosted. That means that when Google shows your video and thumbnail in a Search Engine Results Page (SERP), it will send the clicker to the appropriate page – your page. Bada bing. Bada boom. Website traffic!

If you specify where your video is embedded in that sitemap, Google will direct traffic there, rather than to YouTube, where the video is hosted.

About your thumbnail — it’s important. The thumbnail has the job of representing your video’s content and it should be an image that is engaging, and suggests a visual narrative. Choose it wisely, and submit its URL as part of your Google sitemap.

While the thumbnail does the up-front work to make the user more likely to click on your site, it’s your video title, description and play page URL that do the back-end heavy lifting so that Google will deliver your site in it’s search listing. There is an art to writing effective titles and descriptions for your sitemap, and Google does a good job of explaining it, so I won’t reinvent the wheel here. Just know that by providing strategic metadata with your site map, you will dramatically increase the chances that your video will be found by users, who will then end up on your website, ready for action.

Next in Part 3, the real ROI of ranking high on a search engine results page.