Aileen Nowak discusses the successful implementation of a modern web development approach using the Gatsby framework and Ghost as a headless CMS to rebuild and optimize Ghost's documentation site. The project involved collaboration among a small team of engineers, designers, and marketers to ensure high performance and SEO best practices, including the integration of custom meta data and structured data via the Ghost API and the creation of XML sitemaps. Nowak developed an advanced sitemap plugin for Gatsby, which is open-source and enhances SEO performance by generating organized sitemaps accessible to both humans and search engine robots. The plugin, adaptable to any Gatsby project, automatically updates sitemaps upon publishing new content, resulting in significant improvements in SEO rankings and organic search visibility within weeks of launching the revamped site. The plugin can be accessed through the Gatsby plugin library or GitHub, and it supports any site built with Gatsby, regardless of the CMS in use.