Joost de Valk

Last updated
Joost de Valk
Born (1982-02-16) February 16, 1982 (age 40)
NationalityDutch
OccupationEntrepreneur, App developer
Years active2007-present
Known for Yoast SEO
Notable work
 WordPress SEO

Joost de Valk is an entrepreneur and application software developer from Wijchen, Netherlands who is best known for Yoast SEO. [1] [2] [3] De Valk started out as a consultant and blogger in 2004 before developing Yoast, one of the most successful plug-ins for WordPress. [4] [5]

Contents

Career

De Valk started out as a consultant for companies like: eBay, The Guardian, Disney, [6] and other major companies. Working on the plugin was a hobby in his spare time. De Valk started a blog in 2004, [4] and by 2005 his website for SEO was named "joostdevalk.nl". [7] After moving to and eventually selling the domain "css3.info", de Valk created the Yoast platform in 2007, [3] and launched the first version of WordPress SEO in 2010, and founded the company Yoast BV in 2010. [8] [9]

At first, the Yoast company was to consult before he developed both the Yoast SEO plugin and a Google Analytics plugin, both for WordPress. In 2012, De Valk released a premium version of Yoast SEO. In April 2016, Yoast BV sold the Google Analytics for WordPress plugin. In June 2020, Yoast acquired the Duplicate Post plugin, another very popular WordPress plugin. [10]

The software that De Valk created runs on more than nine million websites and on 11.4% of the top million sites in the world. [11] On WordPress, the De Valk SEO software has been downloaded five million times. Michael David, the author of WordPress Search Engine Optimization (2015), referred to it as "the granddaddy of all SEO plugins". [12]

In January 2019 De Valk stepped down as CEO to become Chief Product Officer for Yoast and began working for WordPress in marketing. [13] De Valk's wife Marieke van de Rakt, took over as director (CEO) of Yoast. [14] De Valk left his position with WordPress after six months citing a failure to see his place in the organization. [13] [15] De Valk and his wife are investors in blockchain startup WordProof. [16]

Personal

When De Valk was twelve years old he borrowed money from his parents for a computer; he then began building websites. He attended the University of Applied Sciences and continued in Internet Technology. At 24 years old he became a father. [6] De Valk married Marieke van de Rakt and together they had four children. Marieke was a professor with a Ph.D and she left her job in 2013 to support Yoast SEO. [17]

Related Research Articles

Larry Page American business magnate and Internet entrepreneur

Lawrence Edward Page is an American computer scientist and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known as one of the co-founders of Google, along with Sergey Brin.

Sergey Brin Co-founder of Google

Sergey Mikhailovich Brin is an American business magnate, computer scientist, and Internet entrepreneur. Together with Larry Page, he co-founded Google. Brin was the president of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc., until stepping down from the role on December 3, 2019. He and Page remain at Alphabet as co-founders, controlling shareholders, board members, and employees. As of March 2022, Brin is the 7th-richest person in the world, with an estimated net worth of $115 billion.

WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in PHP and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database. Features include a plugin architecture and a template system, referred to within WordPress as Themes. WordPress was originally created as a blog-publishing system but has evolved to support other web content types including more traditional mailing lists and forums, media galleries, membership sites, learning management systems (LMS) and online stores. One of the most popular content management system solutions in use, WordPress is used by 42.8% of the top 10 million websites as of October 2021.

IntelliJ IDEA Integrated development environment

IntelliJ IDEA is an integrated development environment (IDE) written in Java for developing computer software. It is developed by JetBrains, and is available as an Apache 2 Licensed community edition, and in a proprietary commercial edition. Both can be used for commercial development.

Anil Dash

Anil Dash is an American technology executive, entrepreneur, and writer. He is the CEO of Glitch, a software development startup company.

Matt Mullenweg American entrepreneur and web developer

Matthew Charles Mullenweg is an American entrepreneur and web developer living in Houston. He is known for developing the free and open-source web software WordPress, now managed by The WordPress Foundation.

Mozilla Corporation American software company

The Mozilla Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation that coordinates and integrates the development of Internet-related applications such as the Firefox web browser, by a global community of open-source developers, some of whom are employed by the corporation itself. The corporation also distributes and promotes these products. Unlike the non-profit Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla open source project, founded by the now defunct Netscape Communications Corporation, the Mozilla Corporation is a taxable entity. The Mozilla Corporation reinvests all of its profits back into the Mozilla projects. The Mozilla Corporation's stated aim is to work towards the Mozilla Foundation's public benefit to "promote choice and innovation on the Internet."

Matt Cutts American software engineer

Matthew Cutts is an American software engineer. Cutts is the former Administrator of the United States Digital Service. He was first appointed as acting administrator, to later be confirmed as full administrator in October 2018. Cutts previously worked with Google as part of the search quality team on search engine optimization issues. He is the former head of the web spam team at Google.

Automattic Inc. is an American global distributed company which was founded in August 2005 and is most notable for WordPress.com, as well as its contributions to WordPress. The company's name is a play on founder Matt Mullenweg's first name.

nofollow is a setting on a web page hyperlink that directs search engines not to use the link for page ranking calculations. It is specified in the page as a type of link relation; that is: <a rel="nofollow" ...>. Because search engines often calculate a site's importance according to the number of hyperlinks from other sites, the nofollow setting allows web site authors to indicate that the presence of a link is not an endorsement of the target site's importance.

Joost

Joost was an Internet TV service, created by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. During 2007–2008 Joost used peer-to-peer TV (P2PTV) technology to distribute content to their Mozilla-based desktop player; in late 2008 this was migrated to use a Flash-based Web player instead.

Google Quick Search Box (GQSB) is an application launcher and desktop search tool developed by Google for Mac OS X computers. It allows users to search files, URLs, and contacts on their computer, as well as performing actions on the results.

OnlyOffice Office suite developed by Ascensio System SIA

OnlyOffice, stylized as ONLYOFFICE, is a free software office suite developed by Ascensio System SIA, a company headquartered in Riga, Latvia. It features online document editors, platform for document management, corporate communication, mail and project management tools.

Vanilla Forums

Vanilla is a Canadian software company founded in 2009 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is both a cloud-based (SaaS) community forum software and an open source community supported software. The company's main product is Vanilla Cloud.

Orange and Bronze Software Labs (O&B) is a privately owned computer software development company based in the Philippines. The company delivers software consulting, product engineering, and IT training services with a focus on Java software development. O&B specializes in developing and deploying web applications using Java-based frameworks and technologies such as Spring (framework), Grails (framework), Hibernate (Java), Google Maps API, Google App Engine, and Android.

Covario, Inc. was an American search marketing agency and technology firm based in San Diego, California. The company specialized in international search engine marketing services and provided software tools for SEO, paid search, social media marketing, analytics, and local search optimization. Its customer base included technology, consumer electronics, financial services, retail, ecommerce, media, entertainment, publishing, and consumer packaged goods organizations. Covario was acquired by the Dentsu Aegis Network in September 2014, and combined with iProspect, the network's performance marketing arm, in early 2015.

Jeremy Stoppelman American business executive

Jeremy Stoppelman is an American business executive. He is the CEO of Yelp, which he co-founded in 2004. Stoppelman obtained a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1999. After briefly working for @Home Network, he worked at X.com and later became the VP of Engineering after the company was renamed PayPal. Stoppelman left PayPal to attend Harvard Business School. During a summer internship at MRL Ventures, he and others came up with the idea for Yelp Inc. He turned down an acquisition offer by Google and took the company public in 2012.

Hummingbird is the codename given to a significant algorithm change in Google Search in 2013. Its name was derived from the speed and accuracy of the hummingbird. The change was announced on September 26, 2013, having already been in use for a month. "Hummingbird" places greater emphasis on natural language queries, considering context and meaning over individual keywords. It also looks deeper at content on individual pages of a website, with improved ability to lead users directly to the most appropriate page rather than just a website's homepage.

Yoast SEO Search engine optimization plugin for WordPress

Yoast SEO is a search engine optimization (SEO) plug-in for WordPress. The plugin has five million active installations and has been downloaded more than 350 million times.

Netlify is a San Francisco-based cloud computing company that offers hosting and serverless backend services for web applications and static websites.

References

  1. ↑ Constantin, Lucian (21 April 2015). "Poor WordPress documentation trips developers, yields plug-ins with XSS flaw". PCWorld . IDG Communications, Inc. Retrieved 4 August 2020.
  2. ↑ "The History of Yoast". Yoast.com. Yoast. Retrieved 4 August 2020.
  3. 1 2 "Yoast SEO And All in One SEO Pack — What to Choose?". PC Tech Group Ltd. 26 June 2020. Retrieved 3 August 2020.
  4. 1 2 Dunlop, Michael. "Joost De Valk – Why I'm Successful Mr Yoast SEO". incomediary.com. IncomeDiary. Retrieved 4 August 2020.
  5. ↑ Ward, Eric; French, Garrett (April 5, 2013). Ultimate Guide to Link Building: How to Build Backlinks, Authority and Credibility for Your Website, and Increase Click Traffic and Search Ranking (Paperback). Irvine, California: McGraw-Hill Companies, Incorporated. p. 179. ISBN   978-1599184425.
  6. 1 2 Kats, Carin (1 June 2018). "This Dutch Google specialist converts € 10 million per year with his internet company and is deliberately not in the Randstad - this is the reason". Business Insider . Retrieved 4 August 2020.
  7. ↑ Dunlop, Michael. "How Joost de Valk became a successful internet entrepreneur". incomediary.com. Retrieved December 8, 2018.
  8. ↑ "Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast, shares his success story". First Web Designer. March 15, 2016. Retrieved December 8, 2018.
  9. ↑ Eisenberg, Bryan (October 7, 2014). "37 SEO Experts Those in the Know Follow". ClickZ. Retrieved December 8, 2018.
  10. ↑ "Yoast Acquires Duplicate Post, Brings on Creator Enrico Battocchi as a Senior Developer". 16 June 2020.
  11. ↑ "Yoast Plugin Usage Statistics". BuiltWith. Retrieved July 2, 2018.
  12. ↑ David, Michael (2015). WordPress Search Engine Optimization: a complete guide to dominating search engines with your WordPress site. Birmingham, UK: Packt Publishing Ltd. p. 264. ISBN   978-1-78588-764-2 – via Google Books.
  13. 1 2 Boogert, Erwin (7 June 2019). "Joost de Valk has left WordPress". Emerce. Retrieved 4 August 2020.
  14. ↑ "Marieke van de Rakt new CEO Yoast". Emerce. 25 January 2019.
  15. ↑ Chandler, Jeff (5 June 2019). "Joost de Valk Steps Down as WordPress Marketing Lead". WorldPress Tavern. Retrieved 4 August 2020.
  16. ↑ "Founders of Yoast SEO take a stake in Amsterdam-based blockchain startup WordProof". 31 August 2020.
  17. ↑ "EP. 5: How the Founders of Yoast SEO Are Managing Happiness". Davidhenzel.com. David Henzel. 2 September 2017. Retrieved 4 August 2020.

Further reading

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.