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 (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 14 years old.
Outside of work Joost enjoys reading, photography and playing board games with his kids.
It’s here! The official release of WordPress 5.5, a major update stuffed with new features and improvements. Not only does this release come with improvements to the block editor, it also allows you to edit inline images, gives you an improved content preview and much (much!) more. To give you an idea of what this […]
Read: "WordPress 5.5 is here! 5 things you need to know"
Every few weeks we have an SEO News video in which Jono Alderson and I, along with other experts, share the latest SEO news with our academy subscribers. Last week, we decided to try this in the form of a webinar where viewers were able to ask us questions right away. Because this was such […]
Read: "The latest news in SEO and WordPress: July 2020"
The canonical URL allows you to tell search engines that certain similar URLs are actually one and the same. Learn how to use rel=canonical!
Read: "rel=canonical: the ultimate guide"
Some posts and pages should not show up in search results. To make sure they don’t show up, you should tell search engines to exclude them. You do this with a meta robots noindex tag. Setting a page to noindex makes sure search engines never show it in their results. Here, we’ll explain how easy it […]
Read: "Noindex a post or page in WordPress, the easy way!"
Today, we’re very proud to announce that Yoast has acquired the Duplicate Post plugin. This plugin, with well over 3 million users, is one of the most popular WordPress plugins right now. The reason for that is clear: it does one task simple and well. Also, its original developer, Enrico Battocchi, will join Yoast as […]
Read: "Announcement: Duplicate Post joins Yoast"
When users search on your website and find no results, that’s usually a bad experience. But if you track these “zero result searches”, you might find yourself with data that can help you identify new content and service opportunities. It might also tell you a lot about the difference between how you see your website […]
Read: "Searching without result: Insights from zero result searches"
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"
The first step in every content SEO strategy should be executing keyword research. In this ultimate guide we'll teach you how to do that.
Read: "Complete beginner’s guide to SEO"
Site speed is one of the factors which determines whether you get a good ranking in Google. Site speed is a ranking factor, and its importance keeps growing. In this blog post, I’ll discuss how to improve your site speed and which tools can help you measure your site’s speed. But first, I’ll answer the […]
Read: "Improving site speed: tools and suggestions"
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 […]
Read: "Yoast SEO 14.0: Much faster thanks to ‘indexables’"
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.
