I'm the CEO at Yoast. My main focus is on growing the company. I'm really passionate about maintaining open and friendly company culture. I'm also heavily involved in the marketing of Yoast and Yoast SEO Academy: the online courses platform I founded.
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I studied Sociology and Communication Sciences at the Radboud University in Nijmegen. I obtained my PhD in Social Sciences in January 2011. Since then, I worked as a researcher as well as a teacher at multiple universities. Since the beginning of Yoast, I have been involved in the company. As of September 2013, I gave up my position at the university and decided to focus solely on my activities at Yoast.
While I started as Chief Strategy Officer, I am now the CEO at Yoast. Together with Joost, Michiel and Omar, I run Yoast. My main focus is on Academy; I develop products that help people to set up their own SEO strategy. My expertise is on SEO copywriting and site structure.
I’m married to Joost de Valk and we have four amazing children together.
WordPress wouldn’t be WordPress if it wasn’t for the people. A strong community that’s open to anyone that wants to do something with this open-source platform. But also a community that’s made up of a lot of volunteers, people investing a lot of their time and other resources to make WordPress even better. To make […]
Read: "Got a great WordPress project? Apply for our Diversity fund"
If you take your SEO and users seriously, you’ll be working on a kick-ass site structure. But, setting up a decent site structure can be challenging. Maintaining a decent site structure when your site is growing, is even harder. With all these new pages on your site, it’s easy to overlook something or make a […]
Read: "6 site structure mistakes and how to avoid them!"
Your focus keyphrase is the keyword(s) you want your post or page to rank for. If you’re particularly eager to rank for a specific keyword, you’ll probably be tempted to optimize many articles on your site for that keyphrase. But, that’s not what a focus keyphrase is for! You should only ever use a focus […]
Read: "Why you should use a focus keyphrase only once"
If you’re not already working on it, now is definitely the time to start with SEO. You need to rank high if you want customers to find you online. So, what should you do? How do you get started with SEO? Or, how do you start with SEO on a brand new site? In this […]
Read: "SEO tutorial for beginners: How to start with SEO?"
Every SEO strategy is focused on ranking as high as possible in the search engines. To do this, we all try to design and develop a website that Google’s algorithm will love. That’s basically what SEO is about. The factors in Google’s algorithm can be divided into two categories which will determine the ranking of your […]
Read: "What is on-page SEO?"
Google is really smart, amazingly smart. The algorithm is very close to reading texts like human-beings. At the same time, parts of Google’s algorithm aren’t smart at all. Computers aren’t that good at understanding ‘what is what’ on a page. If you have a recipe site, you’ll need to tell Google what an ingredient is, […]
Read: "Google’s algorithm is amazingly smart and incredibly dumb at the same time"
How does Google work? What does Google actually do? For many of you, this will be fairly old news. But for everyone who is new to the world of SEO: let me explain what Google does and how SEO works. In a way that is easy to follow, because understanding this really helps you create […]
Read: "What does Google do?"
Google’s knowledge panel is the block you’ll find on the right side of your screen in the search results. Nowadays, you’ll see it for a lot of queries. It presents the results of Google’s Knowledge Graph, which can be seen as an engine connecting all kinds of data Google finds on the web. If you […]
Read: "Google’s knowledge panel: What is it and how to get one?"
SEO should be for everyone. Everyone -big or small- should have a fair chance in the search engines. That’s why we build software for everyone at Yoast. With WordPress, everybody can build a website and publish their ideas. Add our plugin, and you’ll also be able to outrank your competition. In this post, I’ll give […]
Read: "16 sweet reasons to love Yoast SEO!"
If you want to measure your content SEO strategy’s success, you first need to establish your goals. What’s the purpose of your strategy? Do you want higher rankings? More traffic? To evaluate your content SEO strategy, you should identify what success means to you! Once you’ve established your goals, you can measure the success of […]
Read: "How to measure the success of your content SEO strategy?"
