Building a Video Sitemap Generator from Scratch

Google's standard XML sitemap tells search engines about your pages. A video sitemap goes further, providing rich metadata that helps your video content appear in Google Video search results and earn rich snippets. In this article, I'll show you how I built a video sitemap generator in PHP for DailyWatch , a platform with thousands of video pages that need to be discoverable. Why Video Sitemaps? A standard sitemap entry looks like this: <url> <loc> https://dailywatch.video/watch/abc123 </loc> <lastmod> 2026-02-15 </lastmod> </url> A video sitemap entry provides much richer data: <url> <loc> https://dailywatch.video/watch/abc123 </loc> <video:video> <video:thumbnail_loc> https://i.ytimg.com/vi/abc123/mqdefault.jpg </video:thumbnail_loc> <video:title> Amazing Music Video 2026 </video:title> <video:description> Official music video for... </video:description> <video:player_loc> https://www.youtube.com/embed/abc123 </video:player_loc> <video:duration> 272 </video:duration> <video:view_coun