Michiel is a partner at Yoast and our COO. Internet veteran. His main goal with most of his articles on this site is to kick-start your site optimization in the most practical way. He'll tell you even more about how we can help with that on our product pages. So much to do! So little time! Having a blast at Yoast, all day every day.
I built my first website around 1995, TheTropics 7907 on GeoCities, if I recall correctly. <blink> was still accepted. Superman could still move his legs. HTML 1.0.
Studied marketing and ended up:
Besides that, I started blogging at Badlog.nl in 2001 and maintained that blog for almost ten years. Participated in a couple of design contests with the blog in these days (actually won one in 2005). My business started getting more and more serious, the blog was not, so I eventually buried it. Co-founded About:blank, the main online blog magazine of the Netherlands.
In the last couple of years, I have been general manager of a local web design company, started my own business (internet consultancy and websites) in 2009 and met Joost during these years. April 2011, we started working together and February 2012 we sealed that cooperation with a contract.
Esther agreed to marry me in 2005 and we have two beautiful daughters, Puck and Linde. Although sometimes pretty pigheaded, those little girls usually give me fewer headaches than a lot of websites do :)
In 2015 I became one of the partners at Yoast, nowadays alongside Marieke, Joost and Omar. In the early days of Yoast, my days were filled managing and doing site reviews as a senior consultant. As we have grown a lot over the past years, nowadays I am dealing with issues ranging from managing (conversion) optimization of our own site to office/HR related things and writing articles for our blog. Please find all these articles here.
Whether you’re a blogger or write articles for an online magazine or newspaper, chances are you’ll find yourself asking whether your article needs an image or not. The answer is always “Yes”. Images bring an article to life and also contribute to your website’s SEO. This post explains how to fully optimize an image for SEO and […]
Read: "Image SEO: Optimizing images for search engines"
Successful positioning adds value to your store and gives you a head start on the competition. Positioning is the art of standing out, distinguishing your business from others in the mind of your audience. You can stand out with high product quality, great service, low prices, or dedicated care for the environment. But it’s important to communicate this position to your target group, […]
Read: "Positioning your store in the online market"
A website gives you the opportunity to target the entire (online) world. Local SEO, on the contrary, is focused on ranking higher in your local area. Especially now, in the COVID-19 crisis, when people are trying to reach you more often online than offline, it’s worth investing in it. You’ll have to make sure your local […]
Read: "What is local SEO?"
More than half of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices (fact). So if you are ignoring your mobile site, you might be missing out on on a big part of your audience. In this post, I’d liked to go over a couple of ways you can check your own mobile sites. After this post, you’ll be […]
Read: "DIY: Test your mobile site!"
Some of the pages of your site serve a purpose, but that purpose isn’t ranking in search engines or even getting traffic to your site. These pages need to be there, as glue for other pages or simply because regulations require them to be accessible on your website. If you regularly read our blog, you’ll know […]
Read: "Which pages to noindex or nofollow on your site?"
Half of the buttons that are used as the main call-to-action on a web page don’t invite me to click. You could and should test button design but, sometimes, it just starts with common sense. Button UX design has changed a lot over the past decade. A long-standing trend seems to be to blend a […]
Read: "Button UX: designing a clear call-to-action"
Landing pages are a very important part of your website. And if you optimize them, you can really boost your conversion rate. Obviously, you should tailor this page to your preferred audience, but there are a number of things that go for all landing pages. In this post, we’ll go over some best practices to […]
Read: "How to optimize a landing page for users"
We all want to increase our sales, lift engagement, and get the best possible result out of our website. That’s why it only seems right to give you a three-step rocket of SEO quick wins to kick-start your website. In this post, I will show you three things you can do right now to improve […]
Read: "3 SEO quick wins to implement right now"
This ultimate guide covers small business SEO. Want your site to rank high in the local search results? Read all about it here!
Read: "Ultimate guide to small business SEO"
When you’ve determined your shop’s mission, you should focus on finding the right niche for your business. Merriam Webster defines a niche as “the situation in which a business’s products or services can succeed by being sold to a particular kind or group of people”. If you find your niche, you’ll be able to optimize your […]
Read: "Reach the right audience by finding your shop’s niche"
