Joost has a background as an SEO, digital marketer and web developer (in fact he still spends between 25-50% of his time coding). 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 80 people. Yoast SEO is currently available for four open source platforms and active on more than 8 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 (36) 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 3 and 12 years old.
Outside of work Joost enjoys reading, photography and playing board games with his kids.
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"Running a local service business is great, but if things are going well, why stop there? While the area you can cover may vary, depending on the kind of service you offer, there’s no reason you couldn’t broaden your horizon, if you’re ambitious, right? Well, one thing we often hear is that people find it […]
Read: "Ask Yoast: Ranking your service business nationwide"Many of our readers manage multiple sites, in all kinds of different configurations and setups. It’s certainly viable, for example, to manage two or several sites to support the same business. In that case, you might save some time linking between the pages of these sites. Your sites could share the shop pages, and posts […]
Read: "Related sites sharing pages: what to consider?"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"
Allowing people to comment on your content is a great way to increase engagement and get in touch with your audience. So, it pays off to choose a good comment system that works for you. Besides the standard WordPress comment system, there are several other systems out there you can implement on your website so […]
Read: "Comment systems and SEO"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"
Yoast also organizes its own conference! Read all about YoastCon here at Yoast.com and come meet us there! Read about YoastCon 2019 »
