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 12 years old.
Outside of work Joost enjoys reading, photography and playing board games with his kids.
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"
There are many occasions when you may want to put a PDF on your site. For example, when you’ve made an online magazine, when an article you wrote was featured in a book or magazine, if products you sell have useful manuals, or if you’ve written detailed instructions for a DIY project. As you can […]
Read: "PDFs on your website"Picking a theme for your WordPress website can be hard. You want something that looks nice, meets your needs and won’t slow down your website. If you don’t invest some time into picking a theme, you could end up with a theme that only allows you to use <h2> headings, for example. Or you might […]
Read: "Changing your WordPress theme"Let’s say you own the website http://www.some-example.com. After a while, you decide you don’t want to keep the www. You want your visitors to go to the non-www version of your domain instead. What’s more, you’ve also decided to switch from HTTP to HTTPS, to follow security best practices. These two things combined make for quite a move, […]
Read: "Redirecting your site to non-www and HTTPS"As a site owner, you want to come across as an authoritative result, as well as stand out in the search results. Even if you’re already ranking #1. Sitelinks can help you with that. What are sitelinks, you ask? Sitelinks appear under the main search result, highlighting subpages of a website in a menu-like structure. […]
Read: "How to get sitelinks"We often encounter sites with category and tag structures which are completely unmanaged. Even large news sites can suffer from over usage of tags and categories. Tags and categories are both examples of a taxonomy system. When used correctly, a good taxonomy system can boost your site’s SEO. The opposite is also true: when used […]
Read: "Using category and tag pages for SEO"
