Magento allows us to edit any part of a theme using template files, layout XML files, and, of course, CSS (cascading style sheet) files. There are hundreds of free and premium themes available on the Internet and they each have their own take on template page optimization. For the basis of this chapter, we will be concentrating on the Magento base theme, and how we can improve the template markup to better structure our content for SEO and CRO (conversion rate optimization).

Most third-party themes tend to structure their templates on the base theme, so we may see similarities between the code shown here and the code within any custom/downloaded theme that we may have installed.

Magento has evolved rapidly since Version 1.3 back in 2009-2010, especially through changes to the default theme. Where possible, I will try to describe a few major SEO-related problems that exist within these earlier versions and how to fix them.

In this chapter...