Congratulation for purchasing the Genesis Framework. You have made a great choice in joining the family. As advertised on Studiopress.com, the framework comes with built in SEO settings that you could use instead of installing an SEO plugin. Although, I would strongly advise you to not use the Framework’s SEO settings. There are far better, more helpful 3rd party plugins that blow Genesis SEO out of the water. Instead, I recommend the Yoast plugin. It is the best ones to use and is the current SEO plugin for WPoutcast. We also have a list of plugins that are currently active on this blog.
If you do decide to use Yoast after reading further, do check out our detailed tutorial on How To Set Up The Yoast Premium SEO Plugin.
Now, I am going to compare certain dashboard settings that relate to the Genesis SEO settings page.
In-House SEO Settings
Let’s get to setting up the basic settings. Again, let me remind you that StudioPress Sites does not focus that much on SEO when they update the core framework so it is wise to use a notable plugin.
Sitewide Settings
Genesis SEO
Most of these settings are self-explanatory. In case you do not know what HTML5 is, here is a good article on HTML5. If you are not familiar with coding then this information may seem foreign to you. All WordPress themes now come with this built into the theme. StudioPress is way behind in updating their SEO in-house settings to reflect what has changed in the SEO industry.
Here is what the Yoast SEO site settings look like.
Yoast SEO
Several very good features in this one section. HTML5 is a built in feature of the Yoast SEO plugin so there is no setting.
Homepage Settings
Genesis SEO
Straight forward easy to follow instructions but lacking a lot of needed features for best the SEO. There is one other SEO plugin that I also recommend and it’s the WP Meta SEO Plugin.
Here is the homepage setting for Yoast SEO.
Yoast SEO
As you can see below, Yoast has the same features as Genesis and much more!
Document Head Settings
Genesis SEO
This section is actually important. So what is “relationship link” tags?
Here is a short summary from Sitepoint.
The relationship attribute defines the relationship that the linked resource has to the document from which it’s referenced. In most cases, this resource will simply be “stylesheet “, which means, not surprisingly, “the referenced document is a style sheet.” May 15, 2014
You should always enable this feature. I would also like to note that this is a built-in feature in the Yoast SEO plugin. In fact, there are tons of built-in features in the Yoast plugin that you don’t even need to know about. The SEO experts know the importance and have it built into the plugin.
Yoast SEO
Robots Meta Settings
Genesis SEO
Let’s get to the last section of the Genesis Framework SEO settings dashboard. For the record, in the few years that I have been a client on StudioPress, I can only remember one time they actually made some tweaks to the built-in SEO settings. Clearly, their focus is not on SEO but rather the framework itself and the theme. Hence why I strongly recommend a 3rd party SEO plugin.
I do not recommend having all of the boxes in this section checked so, use your discretion in this section.
Yoast SEO
Yoast has a built in SiteMap plugin that does a whole bunch more than the Genesis SEO settings in the above image.
Just giving you a glimpse of both, which one do you prefer? To help you enable the best settings for SEO wise, follow our tutorial on How To Set Up The Yoast SEO Plugin.
- Also Read: Why Choose The Genesis Framework
I am curious to know, do you prefer the Genesis SEO feature or do you prefer an alternative SEO plugin. If you do not use the one that we are using, please let me know in the comment section. Let’s discuss. Further, if you are not a techie and don’t want to take a pain of doing SEO then refer to the World Class SEO Bedford Case Study for further information.
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Nice article