While Youtube videos can a valuable part of an SEO campaign and in driving traffic and online exposure to a website, they are hardly the most valuable SEO technique.

Here was my email response:

Youtube videos can be very effective in SEO campaigns, but shouldn’t make up the only component in an SEO campaign. A website that is optimized well for search engines should include high-quality content on a well-built, search-engine-accessible website, and should be supported by inbound links from other websites. For example, a website with a Youtube video could potentially have errors that prevent search engines from finding the website, or a lack of links and valuable content on the website could prevent search engines from ever finding the content on a website.

Youtube videos can contain useful keywords and usage data that help a website rank well for certain keywords, but aside from helping a website rank, Youtube videos can be effective as content on the website, and can even attract high volumes of web traffic if the video itself is popular on Youtube.com, ranks high on search engines, or is embedded on popular websites or blogs.

A comprehensive survey completed periodically by SEOmoz ,an industry leading SEO training company, polls leading SEO experts’ opinions about the most important and critical factors in getting a website to rank well in search engines, and is useful in gauging the usefulness of Youtube videos in comparison to other on- and off-site SEO practices. Source: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors.

Our experience validates the findings of that survey, and we model our SEO campaigns in the same way, giving the most effective SEO practices the highest priority in our campaigns. Some of the most effective SEO practices include link building (building links using keywords as ‘anchor text’ from external links), using the keyword in the page title tag and content, and building links and references from quality, trusted websites.