Publishing a lot of content and optimizing that content so it gets found in search engines is an important part of inbound marketing, and videos are an important part of content. Given that YouTube is by far the most popular video website, you should be publishing videos there (even if you are a B2B company like HubSpot). You also need to be able to optimize your videos to show up higher in searches on YouTube. Here's how:
SEO for YouTube
1) Title & Description- Just like on-page SEO for web pages, you need to optimize the basic text information describing your videos - the titles and descriptions. These are set when you upload the video. The title should contain a good keyword phrase (it needs to be short because YouTube limits the length). The description can be longer, 2-3 sentences or more is fine, and it should also contain keywords and variations of keywords. Including a URL link at the start of the description is a good idea, since the description is mostly hidden by default, but your link will still be visible and clickable if it is at the beginning. To include a link in the description, just add a full URL (including http://) at the start of your description.
2) Tags - For SEO, you should include at least 5-7 relevant keywords as tags for your video. Using tags will associate your video with other videos that use the same tags, so when people watch a different video, your video will be shown as a "related video" and you can get additional views from people who originally were watching other videos.
3) Popularity / Views- The popularity of your video (the total number of views and the number of views in the past 24-48 hours) is an important factor in how well your video will rank in search results. YouTube prefers to show people popular videos, because they are almost always better videos, and a lot of the videos on YouTube are poor quality. Finally, this isn't really YouTube SEO, but videos that have gotten a big spike in views in the past day or so will get preferred placement - and also will be given "honors" which put your video on lists like "most viewed today" which then in turn attract more views.
4) Inbound Links / Embeds- Inbound links (links from other websites to your website or video) are important in traditional SEO, and are also important in YouTube SEO, with the addition that an embedded video (when someone puts the YouTube video into their own website) functions like an inbound link. You can see how many links and embeds your video has by using YouTube Insights (log into your account, find your video and then on the right-hand side of the page will be a gray button that says "Insights"). Getting more websites to link to and embed your video will help it rank higher in search results, so promote your video to people who might embed it or link to it. Another tip is to find other similar videos and click on "Statistics and Data" below the video, and it will show you "sites linking to this video". If a blog liked another similar video, they might also like yours. You can contact this blog to let them know about your video, hopefully they will also embed it or link to it.
5) Ratings & Comments- Higher ratings and more comments are also indications of better and more interesting videos, so get as many great ratings and comments as you can for SEO purposes. The best way to do this is to make great videos, but if you have already made your video, encouraging your blog readers or friends on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn is a great way to get more ratings, and those ratings are likely to be good because you know those people.
Webinar: How to Use Online Video for Marketing