How to Set Up SEO in the Genesis Framework WordPress Theme

In my view, one of the best features of the Genesis Framework WordPress Theme (click here to read my Genesis Framework review) is the SEO panel configuration options.

Many WordPress themes require installing a 3rd party plugin (i.e. All in One SEO plugin) in order to set up your on-site SEO meta tags for your site as a whole and individual pages and posts. Not with Genesis.

In a nutshell, the following are your on-site SEO options using the Genesis Framework:

For your website as a whole:

• Append site description to the website title on homepage (I typically do this).
• Append site name to title on inner pages (I typically do NOT do this).

Home Page SEO Settings:

You can set out the meta title for website on your home page as well dictate the terms you place in the <h1> tags on the home page.

You can set out a meta description for your home page and your home page keywords.

Inner Page / Post SEO Settings:

For any page or post you create, you can easily insert a meta title, meta description, and meta keywords. You can also Noindex, Nofollow, and/or Noarchive any individual page or post.

I occasionally Noindex a page or post if it’s duplicate content within a site or another website I publish. This is pretty rare, but sometimes for whatever reason, I place an article or post from another site I publish.

Noindex, Nofollow, and Noarchive options

You can apply Noindex, and/or Noarchive to the:

• Home page
• Inner pages
• Category archives
• Tag archives
• Author archives
• Date archives
• Search archives

I typically do not apply Noindex to any of the archive pages (I used to, but no anymore).

You can also apply Nofollow to the home page and any inner page you wish.

You can also opt for canonical paginated archives (I select this as well). When selected, this option points search engines to the first page of an archive.

If you search in Google anything to do “noindex category page in WordPress” you’ll discover quite the ongoing debate about whether you should noindex your category pages.  I know my category pages may be duplicate content because I don’t write custom excerpts, but I index them anyway.  I figure Google isn’t so stupid as to consider archive pages as duplicate content.  If my search engine rankings plummet, I’ll noindex my category and other archive pages.

What you do is up to you.  Do some research.  I believe it doesn’t much matter, but I could be wrong.

Genesis SEO Panel Screenshots

#1: Main Genesis SEO Panel (this is the screenshot for this website):

#2: Inner Pages / Posts SEO Screenshot

Added Bonus With the Parent/Child Framework with Genesis

When you change child themes, your SEO settings remain the same.

BUT – if you change themes altogether (non-StudioPress theme), you may lose some or all of your SEO settings. Recently I’ve had to go through a 200 plus page site after migrating to a StudioPress theme and re-insert all the meta data for each page and post.  You can avoid this by using the SEO Data Transporter plugin created by the folks at StudioPress.  It’s a free plugin and makes migrating themes very easy and fast with respect to your SEO data.

If you leave the fields in screenshot #2 above blank, Genesis will automatically pull the post or page title and use it as the meta title. Your meta description that appears in the search engine listing pages will be a snippet of text randomly pulled from the content of that page or post. This is not very good because it can hurt click-thru-rates into your site from the search engines.

Other than changing out themes from or to Genesis, your SEO set up remains stable. Best of all, you many SEO options for optimally setting up your website(s) for ranking well in the search engines (at least the on-site part of SEO).

Click here to visit the official Genesis Framework website.

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2. Expose Child WordPress Theme Review – A StudioPress Theme
3. Amped Child Theme Review – a WordPress Theme
4. Review of Enterprise Theme by StudioPress – A WordPress Theme
5. Prose WordPress Theme Review – A StudioPress WP Theme