Avatar of Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk is the founder and Chief Product Officer at Yoast.

You can find Joost on: TwitterLinkedinFacebookGithubWordPress

Joost de Valk spends most of his time at Yoast working on Yoast SEO and its addons. As Chief Product Officer he makes sure the roadmap for all our products is managed.

Joost has a background as an SEO, digital marketer and web developer. In the early days of his career, he worked in several IT companies, ranging from enterprise hosting to online marketing agencies. This allowed him to work with several large brands around the world.

In 2010 he founded Yoast, which has as its mission to allow as many people as possible to build a findable website. It empowers people through software (most notably its Yoast SEO plugin) and training. Team Yoast currently consists of more than 100 people. Yoast SEO is currently available for four open source platforms and active on more than 9 million websites.

Besides Yoast, Joost & Marieke have invested in several companies. As a result, Joost also has several advisory roles for companies they have invested in. More about their investments can be found on the website of their investment vehicle Altha.

Private life

Joost (38) and his wife Marieke live in Wijchen, near Nijmegen, where Yoast also has its main offices. Joost and Marieke have four kids: Tycho, Wende, Ravi & Borre, who are between 5 and 13 years old.

Outside of work Joost enjoys reading, photography and playing board games with his kids.

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Yoast SEO 14.0: Much faster thanks to ‘indexables’

28 April 2020 | 281 Comments | Joost de Valk

Today is a special day. Today, a project we’ve been working on for a year sees the light of day. Yoast SEO 14.0 rewrites the playbook on how a WordPress SEO plugin can work. Thanks to an approach we call indexables, we bring you a much faster experience and a new foundation that helps us […]

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The WordPress block editor: Why you should be using it

24 March 2020 | 19 Comments | Joost de Valk

At Yoast, we truly believe you should be using the block editor (formerly known as Gutenberg) in WordPress, simply because it’s a much better experience than the ‘classic editor’. Unfortunately, when we look at our statistics, we see that a large segment of our users still uses the classic editor. Which is why we’d like […]

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Joost likes to talk about SEO, Technical SEO, Open Source.

  • SEO for everyone: what does that even mean?

    Open source, Technical SEO

    Joost kickstarted YoastCon 2019 with his own talk about what we feel SEO for everyone means and how we help websites focus on findability, indexability and rankings.

  • The Victory of the Commons

    Open source

    If you’re running a business based on open source software like WordPress, your business depends on the prosperity of that project. The demise of the project could easily be the demise of your project and the project’s growth could lead to your business growing immensely. The larger your business becomes and the bigger the impact of your company on the project, the more this is true. Economically this is a very unusual situation. Joost will explore what this means and how you should deal with it.

    This is pure economics; it starts with the well known story of the Tragedy of the Commons but, applied to open source, leads to a completely new outcome. If your business is build on WordPress, you should be here to listen to Joost’s talk and discuss afterwards.

  • WordPress SEO in 2019

    Technical SEO

    Joost describes what’s needed for a site to rank well in 2019 and what you need in order to achieve that. In this talk he will cover the latest updates to SEO as well as some basics.