The article is a bit loose with the details. Notice the top searches they used in the experiment were never revealed. Quite likely they were not travel searches. Travel searches rarely turn up video as part of the results. The other thing that the article leaves off completely is the conversion. Just because a video shows up in the results, is someone going to click on it, watch it (on you tube) and then end up on your website to book a stay.
A search for
Vermont Bed and Breakfast turns up no video but a seach for
Steve Jobs Apple does. A search for
Visit New York turns up two and the how to visit NY on $100 actually might get me there, the other video does nothing for me. So the video would have to be well planned out to appeal to people coming to your area, but not be so narrow of focus as to just be about your B&B.
Don't get me wrong, I think video can be a good idea. I just don't think it is the automatic trip to the top of the page that the article suggests it is.
The advice of naming your video files and posting them on you tube is a little disconnected. No matter what you name your video file, once you upload it to youtube, the file name becomes a meaningless sequence of numbers and letters. That is why it is important to fill in the title and other supporting info about the movie content. If you placed the video on your own site directly (without using youtube) then naming the file well would give a slight bit of help, but not much. Better help would be related terms on the page. The best optimization would be to make sure the text actually used in the link(s) to the video are well tuned for the words you want it to show up for.
My hangup with videos is that they can be good or horrible, the same way photos can. Shooting video is more complex than shooting a photo so there is more to screwup. I don't suggest people use cellphone video any more than I suggest they use cellphone photos..