Deciding how to host videos on your site for SEO reasons can be tricky, as there are pros and cons to the most commonly used strategies. When it comes to self-hosting vs. using public platforms, such as YouTube or Vimeo, you must decide which method is best for you.

The benefit of uploading your video to a public platform, such as YouTube or Vimeo, is that your video will likely acquire more views than it would if it was privately hosted on your site. However, just because the video has more views does not mean that your site or product will have more views, as the viewer will have to exit the video site in order to find yours.

Because of this, it is sometimes better for a website creator to privately host and embed their own video. By doing this, you will be forcing Google to bring up your site as the first and only site for your specific video, which can cause more traffic coming to your site.

In order to ensure that your video is actually searched so that your website will come up, it is a good idea to add popularly searched keywords. Examples of this include words like: ‘tutorial,’ ‘review,’ or ‘how to.’

When it comes to video SEO, you must decide what type of hosting is the best option for you in order to fit your site’s needs.