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.
As your site grows, you’ll have more and more posts. Some of these posts are going to be about a similar topic. Even when you’ve always categorized it well, your content might be competing with itself: You’re suffering from keyword cannibalization. At the same time, some of your articles might get out of date. To […]
Read: "Find and fix keyword cannibalization in 4 steps"
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 so, Yoast SEO will run a check on the content of that page to see if search […]
Read: "How to choose the right focus keyword"
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"
Getting rid of duplicate content is a very important task for an SEO. This article discusses common causes & how to identify and fix duplicate content.
Read: "Duplicate content: Causes and solutions"
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. This makes us sad, but […]
Read: "The Block Editor/Gutenberg: Why you should be using it"
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 been visible for a while now in Google’s mobile results. And, as we speak, it’s rolling out for desktop search results too. So, no excuses, your site needs a good favicon. Luckily, setting a favicon in WordPress is very […]
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"
WP Engine DE{CODE} 2020 is a developer-focused event that will take place virtually, and is dedicated to help you build better WordPress experiences faster. A live-streamed event, DE{CODE} will feature 8 expert-led sessions on how to leverage WordPress for easy setups, fast builds, smooth launches, and effortless maintenance. Read about WP Engine Decode »
Joost
The first-ever WordCamp Asia is on the 21st till the 23rd of February 2020. It is in Bangkok, Thailand. Joost is speaking there, and we are going to be there too. Come around and meet us there. Read about WordCamp Asia 2020 »
We’re celebrating 10 years of Yoast in style, with an intimate, invitation-only conference in our home town of Wijchen. Read about YoastCon 2020 »
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.
