№ 11 · Builders & Specialists
Joost de Valk
Founder of Yoast
Made on-page SEO something a non-specialist could actually do.
No individual has put more working SEO functionality in front of more people than Joost de Valk. The Yoast SEO plugin runs on millions of WordPress installations and handles the on-page fundamentals for site owners who will never read a technical audit.
Dossier
- Role
- Founder of Yoast
- Known for
- Put SEO inside WordPress
- Active since
- 2010
- Based
- Netherlands
- Organisation
- Yoast
- Disciplines
- WordPress SEOOpen SourceProduct
- Notable work
- Yoast SEOWordPress
Democratising the basics
Titles, meta descriptions, canonical tags, XML sitemaps, schema output, breadcrumbs, readability prompts — Yoast packaged all of it into an interface that sits inside the editor where content is actually written. That placement decision is the whole product.
Professional SEOs sometimes dismiss the traffic-light scoring as reductive. That misses the point: the plugin's audience is not professional SEOs.
Open source
De Valk has been a long-standing contributor to the WordPress project itself, which is part of why Yoast integrated so cleanly with the platform's own direction of travel.