I am an internet entrepreneur with a background as an SEO, digital marketer, and web developer. In the early days of my career, I worked in several IT companies, ranging from enterprise hosting to online marketing agencies. This allowed me to work with several large brands around the world.
In 2010 I 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 11 million websites.
Besides Yoast, Marieke and I have invested in several companies. As a result, I also have several advisory roles for companies we have invested in. More about our investments can be found on the website of our investment vehicle Altha.
I’m 39 years old and live with my wife Marieke in Wijchen, near Nijmegen, where Yoast also has its main offices. We have four kids: Tycho, Wende, Ravi & Borre, who are between 6 and 14 years old.
Outside of work I enjoy reading, photography and playing board games with my kids.
We’ve said it way back when, but we’ll repeat it: it keeps amazing us that there are still people using just a robots.txt files to prevent indexing of their site in Google or Bing. As a result, their site shows up in the search engines anyway. Do you know why it keeps amazing us? Because […]
Read: "Preventing your site from being indexed, the right way"
Today we released a patch release of Yoast SEO, 15.9.1, to prepare for some of the changes in WordPress core. There were two changes in WordPress itself that we needed to account for, one to do with updates and one to do with meta robots output. We also had to fix an issue with how […]
Read: "Yoast SEO 15.9.1: WordPress 5.7 & FAQ schema patches"
The robots.txt file is a file you can use to tell search engines where they can and cannot go on your site. Learn how to use it to your advantage!
Read: "The ultimate guide to robots.txt"
This guide discusses what hreflang is, what it is for and gives in-depth information on how to implement it for your multilingual websites.
Read: "hreflang: the ultimate guide"
Adding images to your articles encourages people to read them, and well-chosen images can also back up your message and get you a good ranking in image search results. But you should always remember to give your images good alt attributes: alt text strengthens the message of your articles with search engine spiders and improves […]
Read: "Image SEO: How to optimize your alt text and title text"
In the Yoast SEO plugin, you’ll find a focus keyphrase input field for every page on your site. Here, you can enter the keyword or keyphrase you’d like the page to rank for in Google. If you do, Yoast SEO will run a check on the content of that page to see if search engines […]
Read: "How to choose the right focus keyword"
Today we’re announcing something really awesome: Yoast has partnered up with Semrush. The reason why we’re so excited? Keyword research is hard, getting keyword data is even harder and this puts it at your fingertips. Right where you’re writing. Why would Yoast and Semrush work together? Yoast has a lot of users; 11 million+ websites […]
Read: "Yoast and Semrush working together"
Our Yoast SEO plugin handles optimization of your WordPress site for search engines, and we dare say it does that pretty well! Most of it is technical and content optimization, but there’s more to SEO than on-page optimization. You need links pointing to your website and for that to happen, people need to talk about you and […]
Read: "Social media optimization with Yoast SEO"
Another month, another SEO news webinar at Yoast HQ! For the uninitiated, in these webinars, Jono Alderson and myself, run through the most important bits of news relevant to us and to you. We cover many SEO topics and expand on internet marketing and the state of the web itself. Plus, we’re having a ton […]
Read: "The latest news in SEO and WordPress: September 2020"
I’m very excited to announce that Francesca Marano is joining team Yoast as our new WordPress core team lead. When we recently added two WordPress core contributors to our team, we hinted that we were looking for more people. We feel that to be in line with our core values of sharing and collaboration and […]
Read: "New WordPress core team lead: Francesca Marano"
Joost likes to talk about SEO, Technical SEO, Open Source.
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.
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.
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.
