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 150 people. Yoast SEO is currently available for four open-source platforms and active on more than 12.5 million websites.
In 2021 we sold Yoast to Newfold Digital and after a short transition period I took a step back, to work as an advisor. In September 2022 I came back as Interim CTO. My wife Marieke, Yoast’s former CEO, is currently its Head of Strategy and is also still at Yoast on a daily basis. She and I have invested in several companies. I act as an advisor for some of the companies we have invested in. More about our investments can be found on the website of our investment vehicle Altha.
I’m 40 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 7 and 16 years old.
Outside of work I enjoy reading, LEGOs and playing board games with my kids.
Listen to the Yoast SEO podcasts with Joost!
Writing great page titles and SEO titles is an essential skill for anyone doing SEO. Why? Because the title tag can be the first thing a user sees in the search results and it’s also one of the most important factors that Google uses to determine the topic of a page. Well-written titles are essential […]
Read: "How to craft great page titles for SEO"
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"
More and more people, and more and more developers, are talking about structured data, and Schema.org. We talk and have talked about Schema for quite some time at Yoast and we’ve built loads of things with and on top of it. Recently, the proposed block protocol standard started talking about integrating with Schema, and WordPress’ […]
Read: "Why Schema needs to be a graph"
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"
In Yoast SEO, 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. Next, Yoast SEO will run a check on the page’s content to see if search engines will recognize what it is about. […]
Read: "How to choose the right focus keyword"
This post explains a feature we built, and then removed from Yoast SEO 18.3 just before release. It could have been pretty annoying when we released it, so I’m happy we didn’t but I also wanted to share just how hard this sort of thing is to prevent. The feature idea On February 15th, I […]
Read: "The feature that almost made it"
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"
It’s finally here, the official release of our newest product: Yoast SEO for Shopify. The app that can help Shopify users with the SEO of their online store. Not only can our Yoast SEO app help you optimize product pages in Shopify, but it also helps you write great blog posts in Shopify. Making you […]
Read: "Today we’re officially launching Yoast SEO for Shopify"
For over 10 years, Yoast SEO has helped WordPress users all around the world with their SEO. And we’re quite proud to say that with more than 12 million active users, it’s one of the most popular SEO plugins in the WordPress community. We’re not going anywhere, our WordPress plugins will remain one of our […]
Read: "We have big news: Yoast SEO is coming to Shopify!"
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"
Joost likes to talk about SEO, technical SEO and open source.
Technical SEO
Kevin Indig talks to Joost about about the importance of schema for the web, the CMS landscape, and SEO fitness.
SEO
In this SiteGround webinar, Joost talks about the 2021 SEO trends.
WordPress
Joost was interviewed by Sebastiaan van der Lans, WordProof’s founder. Watch them talk about what information on the web can be trusted and how to make the web a better place.
WordPress, Yoast SEO
Joost tells all about the latest version of the plugin, how it not only optimizes SEO on your site but behind the scenes there is a team of linguists helping you write more clearly and concisely.
Content SEO, Yoast SEO
Joost is presenting the exact same topic as he did 10 years ago at WordCamp Bulgaria, but with many improved suggestions! He talks about what changed but also what didn't change. Enjoy watching!
WordPress, Yoast SEO
Joost was interviewed by Andrea Di Rocco, founder of SOS WP and author of TUTTO SEO. They talk about Yoast SEO, the future of SEO, the difference between WordPress and other CMSs, and the role of schema.
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.
Open source, Yoast SEO
[Dutch] In Top Names, Joost talks about Yoast, the work he and the company do for Wordpress and the importance of 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.
Yoast SEO
Joost kicked off YoastCon 2019 with his talk about the meaning of SEO for everyone and how we help websites improve their 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.
