Joost de Valk
Founder at Yoast.com
Joost de Valk is the owner and creator of Yoast.com. He's a WordPress / Web developer, SEO & and an Open Source fanatic.
He's also (and more importantly) the father of a son called Tycho, a daughter called Wende and the husband of a lovely wife called Marieke.
Find Joost on:
Want to test my WordPress SEO plugin?
I’m getting closer and closer to releasing my WordPress SEO plugin. Turns out it’s not as easy as I thought to get this right straight off the bat, and it’s thus taking more and more time. I have also learned in my recent years of developing though, that getting a version out and feedback in [...]
Sponsored review: SEO Rank Analysis with Authority Labs
As you all know, the first link on a Google search page has, on average, a 40% click through rate. Another 50%+ of the clicks go to the subsequent links on the page, with remaining clicks being scattered over subsequent pages. Most people will, in fact, search for another term rather than clicking through to [...]
WordCamp Bulgaria: my presentation & more
So I was in Sofia, Bulgaria for WordCamp Bulgaria. They write in Cyrillic and talk Bulgarian there; meaning I’ve never felt like a stranger this much ever in my life. In a good way though because the people were awesome. These people included Dobromir and Ivan, the two organizers, Nikolay from Automattic, Stefanos from Greece [...]
Track SEO rankings with Google Analytics
Mike Pantoliano of Distilled had a good post over at SEOmoz about how to turn Google Analytics into your own rank tracker. We have been playing with the cd= parameter at Yoast before to track SEO rankings, as Mike also notes, and his improvement on the idea is a welcome one. In the comments, my [...]
Affiliate Links and SEO
Google will always say they won’t penalize you for affiliate links per se, but for thin content around it. I can make this into a long story, but let’s make it short: there’s very good reasons for me and several other highly respected SEO’s and affiliates around the world to think otherwise. Let me show [...]
Rant: courtesy amongst open source users
So, I love the idea of open source development. The adage of “in the eyes of many, all bugs are shallow” has always appealed hugely to me. Heck, I want other developers to fix the bugs I created. It just makes sense, doesn’t it? They use my stuff; if they encounter a bug and are [...]
The basis of keyword research
Keyword research is the basis of all search marketing. It is the art of explaining what you do in the language that people use, and thus it should probably be the basis of all your marketing activities, both on and off the web. As an SEO, I use keyword research to determine what we should [...]
SEO Hosting
How bad hosting can lead to losing SEO rankings Downtime of your website can lead to vastly decreased performance in organic search. I’ve been saying this for years, and have had some small examples to show for it. Now though, I’ve got a great example that I wanted to share with you. The client in [...]
“Design by” footer links…
When you’ve had someone build a website for you, it turns out to be common practice for that “someone”, usually a web developer or a web designer, to add a “design by” or “website developed by” footer link to your site. Let me make my point clearly: if they haven’t given you a discount to [...]
Doug Richard’s mentoring club
I’m currently at Made in 48 hours lecturing a few hundred people about effective search engine marketing and search engine optimization. The event has been set up by Doug Richard, known to people in the UK as a former Dragon from Dragon’s Den and a serial entrepreneur, VC and teacher of small business and startups. Doug has [...]
