Joost spends most of his time at Yoast working on Yoast SEO, as Chief Product Officer. In addition to that, he’s also the Marketing & Communications Lead for WordPress.org.
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, he currently serves as an advisor to Mapfit and Student.com. 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 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"
As we announced at YoastCon, we’re working together with Bing and Google to allow live indexing for everyone who uses Yoast SEO — free and premium. In an update currently planned for the end of March, we’ll allow users to connect their sites to MyYoast, our customer portal. After that we’ll roll out live indexing, […]
Read: "Live indexing for Bing & Google coming to Yoast SEO"
As you’re probably aware, at Yoast we’re all about WordPress. But of course, there are other ways to build a website, like with another content management system, or even by static site generation. If you’ve only ever used a Content Management System (CMS), like WordPress, to build your website, you may wonder what static site […]
Read: "Static site generation and SEO"Imagine the following situation: you have a local business, like a shop, or service business, and you carefully optimize your website to make sure people can find you, online and in real life. You add your data to Google My Business and work on a great local content SEO strategy. Also, you make sure you […]
Read: "Moving to a new city and keeping your business’s website"A while ago, we gave the advice not to upgrade to WordPress 5.0 as it was nearing release. I’m happy to say that as of about a week ago, we feel we’re happy for everyone to move to WordPress 5.0 and start using Gutenberg. Of course, we still advise you to make sure you test how […]
Read: "On Gutenberg and WordPress 5.0"
Tackling your site improvements with solid data, is always a good idea. And, to find loads of interesting data, all you have to do is go to Google Search Console. It can tell you how often a specific page is shown, or how often people clicked on your website in Google’s search results, for example. […]
Read: "Which posts to update first: low ranking or low CTR?"Adding images to your articles encourages people to read them, and well-chosen images can also back up your message and get you a good ranking in image search results. But you should always remember to give your images good alt attributes: alt text strengthens the message of your articles with search engine spiders and improves […]
Read: "Image SEO: alt tag and title tag optimization"
Sometimes I encounter new “SEO hacks” that people apply, that are actually anti-patterns. One of these new anti-patterns I noticed is the pattern of 301 redirecting all your 404 pages to your homepage. Let me explain why this is a lot like cleaning up your room by throwing everything into a drawer and what the […]
Read: "SEO Anti-patterns: 301 redirect all your 404s to your homepage"
The start of a new year is a great moment to work on cleaning up your site and finally doing the work you’ve been putting off. Getting rid of old stuff that’s floating around your site is a typical example of jobs that tend to get postponed. Similarly, the new year is a great time […]
Read: "Moving domain and WordPress clean install"