Edwin is an experienced strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he worked for a web design magazine, where he learned how to create great content.
You can find Edwin on: Twitter
In 2006, after working full time in a bookstore for many years, I boldly decided to return to school. I wanted to combine my love for writing with the lure of the internet, so I picked Digital Communication at the HAN University of Applied Sciences in Arnhem. Four years later, I graduated with honors.
In the meantime, I started working for The Netherlands’ largest monthly magazine on web design and development. As a managing editor, I wrote, edited, and translated hundreds of articles on this fascinating subject. I also made sure the magazine’s day-to-day operations went according to plan.
At Yoast, I do much of the same work, except on a bigger scale. As a content specialist, I am responsible for delivering quality content that is engaging and optimal.
In my spare time, I love rocking my 1972 Fender Precision bass with my band (Every Other Me), fiddling about with synthesizers, listening to music, watching an endless stream of – classic – movies, taking long cycling trips, and enjoying life with my sons and girlfriend.
Most releases are all about incredible new features or fixing a gazillion bugs with the help of the community. But sometimes, there’s a small release that is unfortunately timed just before a big one. There may not be any new game-changers in Yoast SEO 8.4, but does that mean it shouldn’t get its own release […]
Read: "Yoast SEO 8.4: Helping you optimize taxonomies"
It’s hard to imagine a life without a search engine that knows what it’s doing. I remember the days of AltaVista and co, search engines that just dump random pages on you for every given query. I was so excited to see Google enter the scene and immediately do everything right — the results were […]
Read: "Google at 20: Journeys, AI-driven results and visual search"
After introducing a slew of new features, an improved meta box, and fully supporting Gutenberg in the previous three releases, it’s time to take a little breather with Yoast SEO 8.3. That’s not to say that this release is nothing but fluff — one look at the changelog will make you think twice. This release […]
Read: "Yoast SEO 8.3: Community improvements"
While we’re still only at the start of the Gutenberg adventure, we’re presenting an awesome, brand-new feature for the new WordPress editor today. Meet the Yoast SEO structured data content blocks! The content blocks automatically add valid structured data code to the content that is added to these blocks. Our initial line-up consists of How-to […]
Read: "Yoast SEO 8.2: Automatically add structured data with Gutenberg content blocks"
Journalists have been using the inverted pyramid writing style for ages. Using it, you put your most important information upfront. Don’t hedge. Don’t bury your key point halfway down the third paragraph. And don’t hold back; tell the complete story in the first paragraph. Even online, this writing style holds up pretty well for some […]
Read: "First things first: writing content with the inverted pyramid style"
Two weeks ago, we launched Yoast SEO 8.0. In it, we shipped the first part of our integration with Gutenberg: the sidebar. That release was the foundation on which we are building the next parts of our integration with the new WordPress editor. In Yoast SEO 8.1, we introduce part 2: a Gutenberg-proof snippet preview. […]
Read: "Yoast SEO 8.1: Gutenberg part 2, introducing the snippet preview"
You’ve probably come across the term duplicate content quite a lot, but what is it? Duplicate content is content that lives in several locations — i.e., URLs. It can harm your rankings and many people say that copious amounts of it can even lead to a penalty by Google. That’s not true, though. There is […]
Read: "What is duplicate content?"
Semantics is hard. What does a certain word mean in a specific situation? Which ‘mars’ are you talking about? Have you ever tried to discover all definitions of ‘run’? In most cases, context is everything. You can help humans and machines understand a text better by adding context. This is one of the reasons Yoast […]
Read: "Yoast SEO 7.8: Synonyms and keyword distribution"
The snippet editor is one of the core pieces of technology in Yoast SEO. It helps you build snippets that truly stand out in the search results to get you traffic. To make this vital piece future-proof and to update it with new features, we needed to rebuild it. In Yoast SEO 7.7, you’ll find […]
Read: "Yoast SEO 7.7: New snippet editor & better snippet variables"
Well, it was fun while it lasted. In Yoast SEO 7.6, we’re reverting the snippet length for meta descriptions in the snippet editor to follow Google’s latest change. That’s not all though, we’ve also updated our support for the Russian language, added transition words for Catalan, redirect support for WP-CLI and fixed several bugs. Find […]
Read: "Yoast SEO 7.6: Shorter meta descriptions are back ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"
