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.
Joost (37) 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 4 and 13 years old.
Outside of work Joost enjoys reading, photography and playing board games with his kids.
The ONLY tutorial you need to boost your search engine traffic by improving your WordPress SEO. Tips on WordPress SEO plugin usage, structuring your site and optimizing your theme!
Read: "WordPress SEO: the definitive guide"
Sometimes Google does announcements about new features and we go “huh, why did they do that?” This week we had one of those. Google introduced a new set of robots meta controls, that allows sites to limit the display of their snippets in the search results. There is a reason for that, but they buried […]
Read: "Robots meta changes for Google"
Have you seen that icon in the search results in front of your website’s URL? It’s visible for most people in mobile results now. So, no excuses, your site needs a good favicon. Luckily, setting a favicon in WordPress is very easy. Here we’ll explain how to change the favicon of your WordPress site! We’ve […]
Read: "How to change your favicon in WordPress: a step-by-step guide"
Social previews in Yoast SEO visualize what your post will look like when shared on Facebook or Twitter. You can see right away if your image fits and whether your title and description will display well. It works much like the snippet preview people have come so used to. As the snippet preview does for search […]
Read: "Social Previews in Yoast SEO Premium"
Our Yoast SEO plugin handles optimization of your WordPress site for search engines, and we dare say it does that pretty well! Most of that is technical optimization, like our XML sitemap functionality, and content optimization, like your content and readability analysis. But there’s more to SEO than that. You need links pointing to your website and […]
Read: "Social media optimization with Yoast SEO"
If your website is important to your business, it’s essential to schedule time to keep it running smoothly. Therefore we regularly write about the things you should do to keep your site in shape. In this post, we’ll write about the most basic of all: checking for 404 errors. Note: this post does not cover the required elements of a […]
Read: "Website maintenance: Check and fix 404 error pages"
Writing good page titles is an essential skill for anyone doing SEO. Why? Because the title tag is the first thing a user sees in search results, but it’s also one of the most important factors that Google uses to determine the topic of a page. This makes titles essential to SEO and this article […]
Read: "How to craft great page titles for SEO"
What’s the difference between your brand and your keywords? Are you using both effectively? Of course, you want to be found for your brand name. So your brand is one of your keywords. It shouldn’t be your only keyword though, nor should you have lots of keyphrases but no brand. There should be a keyword strategy […]
Read: "Where your branding meets your keyword strategy"
Whenever you delete a page (or post) from your site, you also delete one or more URLs. That old URL, when visited, will usually return a ‘404 not found’ error, which is not the best thing for Google or your users. Is that what you really wanted to happen? You could redirect that deleted page […]
Read: "How to properly delete a page from your site"
If you want to get more clicks from search results, you need to optimize how your site looks in those search results. A single result in a set of search results is called a snippet. The Yoast SEO plugin has a snippet preview, which shows a simulation of what your post will look like in those […]
Read: "The snippet preview: what it means and how to use it"
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.
