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 100 people. Yoast SEO is currently available for four open-source platforms and active on more than 11 million websites.
Besides Yoast, Marieke and I have invested in several companies. As a result, I also have several advisory roles for companies we have invested in. More about our investments can be found on the website of our investment vehicle Altha.
I’m 39 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 6 and 15 years old.
Outside of work I enjoy reading, photography and playing board games with my kids.
Here at Yoast, we’ve been using Algolia to power our site search for quite a while now. Specifically, we’re using the WP Search with Algolia plugin by WebDevStudios to index our content. And we were reasonably happy with that set up. But then we found a better way. A few weeks ago I came up […]
Read: "Site search with Algolia – improved"
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"
Sometimes, your site will need some downtime, so you can fix things or update plugins. Most of the time, this tends to be a relatively short period in which Google will most likely not attempt to crawl your website. However, in the case that you need more time to get things fixed, chances are much […]
Read: "HTTP 503: Handling site maintenance correctly 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"
We’ve said it way back when, but we’ll repeat it: it keeps amazing us that there are still people using just a robots.txt files to prevent indexing of their site in Google or Bing. As a result, their site shows up in the search engines anyway. Do you know why it keeps amazing us? Because […]
Read: "Preventing your site from being indexed, the right way"
Today we released a patch release of Yoast SEO, 15.9.1, to prepare for some of the changes in WordPress core. There were two changes in WordPress itself that we needed to account for, one to do with updates and one to do with meta robots output. We also had to fix an issue with how […]
Read: "Yoast SEO 15.9.1: WordPress 5.7 & FAQ schema patches"
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"
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"
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: How to optimize your alt text and title text"
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"
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.
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.
