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 (38) 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 5 and 14 years old.
Outside of work Joost enjoys reading, photography and playing board games with his kids.
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, Yoast SEO will run a check on the content of that page to see if search engines […]
Read: "How to choose the right focus keyword"
Today we’re announcing something really awesome: Yoast has partnered up with SEMrush. The reason why we’re so excited? Keyword research is hard, getting keyword data is even harder and this puts it at your fingertips. Right where you’re writing. Why would Yoast and SEMrush work together? Yoast has a lot of users; 11 million+ websites […]
Read: "Yoast and SEMrush working together"
Our Yoast SEO plugin handles optimization of your WordPress site for search engines, and we dare say it does that pretty well! Most of it is technical and content optimization, but there’s more to SEO than on-page optimization. You need links pointing to your website and for that to happen, people need to talk about you and […]
Read: "Social media optimization with Yoast SEO"
Another month, another SEO news webinar at Yoast HQ! For the uninitiated, in these webinars, Jono Alderson and myself, run through the most important bits of news relevant to us and to you. We cover many SEO topics and expand on internet marketing and the state of the web itself. Plus, we’re having a ton […]
Read: "The latest news in SEO and WordPress: September 2020"
I’m very excited to announce that Francesca Marano is joining team Yoast as our new WordPress core team lead. When we recently added two WordPress core contributors to our team, we hinted that we were looking for more people. We feel that to be in line with our core values of sharing and collaboration and […]
Read: "New WordPress core team lead: Francesca Marano"
You probably know the feeling. You’re Googling for a term you’d (like to) rank for and you see a competitor that has a search result that looks incredible. It has star ratings or an image, or both. Or it might have a video, or some other thing. These are so-called rich results. They stand out […]
Read: "How to get great looking Google results"
Getting a Schema.org implementation right on a website was always enormously painful. There was not enough documentation and no good tools to help you to make it truly simple. For years, even the best implementations were still just a fragmented mess. In the spring of 2019, we fixed that with Yoast SEO 11.0 — and […]
Read: "Schema.org is hard, Yoast SEO makes it easy for you"
Every month, Jono and I sit down to discuss the latest news in SEO in a live webinar for our Yoast SEO Academy members. It’s a fun way for us to provide you some of our insights on what’s happening right now. In addition, you get to ask your questions as well, so it’s a […]
Read: "The latest news in SEO and WordPress: August 2020"
I’m happy to welcome two new members to team Yoast, who will spend their time making WordPress core better. Justin Ahinon and Ari Stathopoulos are both joining our ranks. This means they’ll have even more time than they already did to spend on making WordPress better for everyone. All of this in line with our […]
Read: "Welcoming two new WordPress Core contributors"
It’s here! The official release of WordPress 5.5, a major update stuffed with new features and improvements. Not only does this release come with improvements to the block editor, it also allows you to edit inline images, gives you an improved content preview and much (much!) more. To give you an idea of what this […]
Read: "WordPress 5.5 is here! 5 things you need to know"
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.
