I don’t often quote press releases, but this release by Vmatrix is quite accurate:

Two hottest trends in online marketing – streaming video and video SEO – will take off in popularity in 2009. According to online marketing studies, Google’s universal search algorythms, which allow multimedia to appear in search results along with web page links, will change the look of Google search results. More video links and thumbnail images of video links will be seen on Google because more people are searching for video than website content.

I trust that marketers will start posting video content on YouTube if only to help SEO rankings. It works, and in fact Google (not surprisingly) is rather kind to video. Not only do my videos get indexed quickly for terms, but my thumbnail (the image) appears on results. You can’t buy that kind of attention using paid-search ads (remember the eye-trackers show that more than 80% of the attention goes to organic rankings not ads, and ads don’t permit images).