Avatar of Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk

I'm the founder and Chief Product Officer at Yoast. I spend most of my time at Yoast working on Yoast SEO and its addons. As Chief Product Officer I make sure the roadmap for all our products is managed.

You can find Joost on: TwitterLinkedinFacebookInstagramGithubWordPress

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.

Private life

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.

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Preventing your site from being indexed, the right way

19 March 2021 | 18 Comments | Joost de Valk

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"
spider traps

Yoast SEO 15.9.1: WordPress 5.7 & FAQ schema patches

4 March 2021 | 2 Comments | Joost de Valk

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 […]

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Featured image Yoast SEO patch for WordPress 5.7



Image SEO: How to optimize your alt text and title text

3 December 2020 | 21 Comments | Joost de Valk

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 […]

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Good alt text or alt tags improve accessibility of your site


Joost likes to talk about SEO, Technical SEO, Open Source.

  • SEO for everyone: what does that even mean?

    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.

  • The Victory of the Commons

    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.

  • WordPress SEO in 2019

    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.