Video should be part of your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) plan. You can use it to drive traffic and like any other content, get links back to your website.

There are some basic steps you can take, but if video is a big part of your content strategy you may need to dig further into the technical side of optimisation for each platform to get the most value.

Basic steps to 'SEO' your video

1. Plan first - Define your goals so your content matches your business goals and your audience needs. This is a precursor to SEO but still a vital piece because if these aren't aligned, your SEO efforts will be wasted. Check the keywords you are targeting and that they are the right ones (ie relevant, profitable, reasonable volume with low competition)
2. Create compelling content that is informative and relevant to your brand and service offering.
3. Once your video is uploaded to your video hosting solution of choice you need to add information to help your video get found. How you do this will be different depending on what platform you use, so check help for each one if you need it.  This will include a catchy title that grabs attention, tags (ie keywords) to help your video be found and a great description that accurately describes the content.
4. When embedding video on your website, surround the video with relevant content. Consider providing a transcript of the video content.  Make sure you optimise the page itself using regular SEO techiques such as title tags.
5. Create regular video content that builds an audience over time. Like non-video content, sharing counts. Comments, shares and likes will see the video rank higher as does the number of subscribers to your channel.
6. Create links back to your website using annotations*. If people are sharing your content but the links all go back to You Tube, consider reaching out to those people and asking them for a link directly to your website.
7. Submit a video sitemap to Google so you can have a rich snippet show up in Google's search results. Check out this guide to Creating Video Sitemaps

Self host if you can

Consider hosting videos on your own website (instead of Youtube or Vimeo). Then when people link to the video they are linking back to your domain, and this will be better for SEO. Self hosting your video can have bandwidth implications so check with your hosting provider and consider a specialist video hosting solution.

*You can now add links in your YouTube videos using the annotations feature, with instructions on how to do this here: http://www.reelseo.com/youtube-associated-website-link-annotations/