SEO Analysis: Should You Host Video on Your Own Website? with Grant Crowell. In this video interview, videologist Grant Crowell discusses the pros and cons of hosting your video on YouTube vs. third-party sites. The goal of video SEO, he says is to get your video to show up on Google’s universal search to bring quality traffic while maintaining control. Videos do get good exposure in YouTube’s popular search engine. But if the video is on YouTube, the people who view it there may not come to your website. An online video platform is a third-party company that manages your video content. An example might be Ooyala.com. They handle hosting as well as transcoding, which is converting your video to formats suitable for the web, as well as for mobile devices. With the Google Video Sitemap, you can now host videos with one of these third-party platforms, but have Google point people to view it on your own site. This brings better quality traffic as well as allowing control over the image thumbnails and what the viewer does after the video is completed. Grant Crowell is a videologist with ReelSEO, The Online Video Marketer’s Guide covering the business and technology of online video. They provide news, research, analysis, tips and trends for the online video and Internet marketing industries. This interview was recorded at the Search Engine Strategies Conference in Chicago, October 2010.