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.
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"
As soon as WordPress 5.3 comes out, Yoast will only support WordPress 5.2 and WordPress 5.3, and not versions before that. This means we’ll end our support for WordPress 4.9, which we’d kept alive for a little bit longer than usual to allow people to transition to WordPress 5.0 and the classic editor. I’d like […]
Read: "Supporting older versions of WordPress"
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"
Getting a Schema.org implementation right on a website was – until today – enormously painful. There was not enough documentation and no good tools to help you to make it truly simple. The best implementations so far really are, sadly, still just a fragmented mess. Today, we’ve fixed that. The best Schema.org implementations we see […]
Read: "Schema.org is hard; we’re making it easy"
It can be hard to pick the right tags for a post. But they are important and that’s why we’ll explain how you can choose them. One of the most difficult things to do, as your site becomes bigger, is creating and maintaining a logical site structure. Tags and categories can help create that structure, […]
Read: "Tagging posts properly for users and SEO"
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"
