Unlike pound cake which requires mixing whole eggs with creamed butter, or sponge cake which requires beating the egg white and egg yolk separately, genoise cake requires beating the whole eggs, till it forms soft “ribbons".
The whole eggs are beaten until it triples in size, becomes pale, fluffy, and drips in thick slow ribbons. The main point of this cake (and also sponge cake) is that you should incorporate air into your ingredients as much as possible, because it is the air that will help your cake to rise. The recipe does not call for baking powder or any other leavening agent, so the air in your batter is VERY IMPORTANT! But if you're not confident about the incorporated air in your batter, go ahead to add your leavening agent.
How do I make sure enough air is incorporated into my cake, you may ask: Sift your dry ingredients, especially your flour, multiple times. I always go for three times.
Use cake flour. Now cake flour is costly, so there's a work-around: addition of a few mils of cornflour into your all-purpose flour does the trick. There are specific measurements for that.
Beat your eggs well, until it is as described above.
When mixing the dry and wet ingredients together, don't stir your batter as if you're stirring soup. Instead you “fold" the dry ingredients into the wet ingredients. That way the amount of air lost from the batter is minimal.
This goes for all types of cake, unless you want a dense, tiring-to-eat cake, that doesn't rise. I don't think anyone will want those types of cakes.
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