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"description": "", "isPartOf": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/10-years-of-yoast/" }, "thumbnailUrl": "https://img.youtube.com/vi/27_iFw_W-HE/maxresdefault.jpg", "embedUrl": "https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/27_iFw_W-HE", "uploadDate": "2022-08-16T00:00:00.000Z", "duration": "PT33M46S", "inLanguage": "en-US", "transcript": "our first speaker is the founder of Yoast and while he is no longer the CEO he remains really important to our company so give it up for Yosef oh so good morning I've got some very very exciting exciting things to share this morning and so I'm really looking forward to it but I wanted to explain with in the very beginning like what is it that we really do we say SEO for everyone we say that a lot but when we say that what do we even mean what we mean is that we want you to be able to compete with everyone we want you to we want you to be able to make a website and make it found by search engines and on social networks we don't care whether you're Disney or Microsoft or a local shoe store even though the local shoe store cannot afford to pay our lunches so we don't even really care whether you can afford the assessee of premium every feature that we think is really important for you to be able to rank your website is in the free version of us SEO of course your sessio premium has its benefits and it will have more benefits over time but the benefits will always be things that save you time and to make things easier for you to do if we really think something is truly important for you to rank your website it'll be in u.s. SEO free that is what SEO for everyone means to us and apparently it's working because as of this moment we have 9 million websites using us SEO worldwide which is an absolutely mind-boggling number it also makes me afraid every time we hit the Update button because if we break something we break a lot of sites but because that number is so large I think I'm allowed a slight bit of arrogance on that part so let's go in and redefine SEO it's only a bit of work right in the last few years voice search has started popping up and as I said a year and a half ago voice search has already changed all of search not because everyone is now using voice search but because all the search engines are getting ready for a world where voice search is the default so everything has been changing in that regard and that has changed a lot about how we think about SEO now traditionally we split up SEO and two things in technical SEO and content SEO and while these two things are very different steps of the SEO process it doesn't really fit well with what it really is that SEO is so we're going to try and talk about it a bit a bit differently while still admitting that there is a technical side to SEO and the content side to SEO I think we should split it up like this first of all discovery where is it in traditional SEO this would be called crawling we'll talk about that in a bit then there's indexing what is it search engines grab the page and later on they start indexing it then they start analyzing what's on that page how do these pages relate to each other what are these different versions doing and then there's ranking how good is it how important is that page how many links does that page have so I'm gonna go through all these free phases and try to explain what we're doing right now to help you in all of these phases and the first one is also I think the most exciting thing that I can share with you this morning you see discovery of content has historically been done through different means first there were search engines that had direct URL submission you had to submit your site to be crawled by a search engine then there came search engines that follows links and have PageRank and and used those links to discover new pages later on we added XML sitemaps to that process to show search engines like this these are all the pages on our site and in the last few months something else has been added to that and that's api's and that's where I can share this really exciting announcement that we're working with both Bing and Google to build something new we're building an option to allow you to log in from your plugin on your site to our customer portal my Yoast and if you make it make that connection later on this will be life I hope by the end of March we'll send your new published posts your updated posts and your deleted both posts straight into Google and Bing so if you hit publish within one minute both search engines will crawl that page because we will send them to ping about that new page being there it's no longer a process of us updating an XML sitemap and then the search engine grabbing the XML sitemap checking the last modified days is searching through that it's a straight we have the URL we ping it to the search engine this means that your changes to sites will be indexed within seconds so in a minute of you posting you'll be able to search on your content something that really only the largest publishers in the world have been able to do so far we think this is pretty mind-blowing because this basically means that off those free portent problems discovery is now a solved problem you can connect your site to my Yoast you can build a new site and every new page that you publish will be in the index done of course there's spam mechanisms on there and etcetera so we can't guarantee any rankings or anything because we don't have anything to do with that but we can tell you that we'll send the data to them and that they'll crawl that page now the next step is also very very interesting because there's a lot happening in that regard indexing is really changing a bit why is indexing changing well it used to be about content and metadata we had pages with titles meta description those of you or have been in this industry long enough might even remember meta keywords and all these other very weird things that we stuff then over time we added things like canonicalization trying to show that while we have ten different version of a URL only this simple version should be in Google or Bing then we added rendering on to that where search engines started to actually render out those pages to see what's on those pages onesearch when users see them a change that is very very important because it it really makes all the difference in how people interact with that page it's also one of the main reasons for breakage on a lot of sites still because a rendered page looks different in the search engine than it does for normal users then we have things like href Lang and a lot of other concerns will have a later speak later on which is speaking about something else in a straw flying if your interest Natura flying we have a great course on that but it's basically the worst specification ever to come out of search engines all of this is very important for adding new stuff to that for a basic WordPress site we've solved most of that we've solved the chronic economical ization if you're not doing multilingual then we've basically solved it all if you are doing multilingual I'm basically going to be honest and say wow there's stuff to do and other CMS's might at this point in time do it better I'm going to go into ranking first and then we'll get back to the combination of these things because ranking basically consists of a couple of things it's quality of your content it's your authority how many external links you have it's internal links and site structure probably one of them still the most actionable parts of SEO and it's quality quality quality quality quality I can't say that enough so quality quality of content is becoming more and more important because all the other things are solved up until now a lot of SEO was making sure that your stuff was found by the search engines in the first place but because because we're making all that step so very easy your quality matters more than ever before and your site structure and your external links start to matter more weirdly enough so we've been working on a project called the recalibration project if you follow us online you might have seen our videos about that and or read one of our posts where we're recalibrating our SEO analysis within the plugin and the question we ask is what is quality can we define that better can we do actual scientific research something that in the SEO community is always hard because there's so many things that you have to take into account we're currently beta testing that and there is already more than a hundred thousand people running the beta test and so far the results are very good I'm very positive so we'll probably flick it on in a while from now if you want to try to beat a you have to be quick because of the next release we're probably disabling to be tougher for a bit so if you want to be in an enable it and go in I dare say that with the things that we're announcing today and tomorrow about what we're going to do in 2019 we will really take away the last hurdles for getting your site into Google Bing and all those indexes your content will be discovered your content will be ranked especially if you're on WordPress and I'll give a shout out to the guys here a front for from Mac Cerf who built our type of three years SEO extension because that is almost nearly as good so your content will be discovered and your content will be indexed but will you get it right and the question there is how do you get stuff ranked in 2019 now I'm not gonna do a talk on how you should write the best content because other people here can talk about that way better but I will tell you this Rich Snippets are everywhere the ten blue links that we all knew in years past have really really gone if you search for recipes your results always look like this there really is no recipe result that anymore where you don't get the Rich Snippets and it's important to understand how this works there's this wonderful thing called schema.org that we talk about a lot but it's probably hard to understand if you're not straight into it but this is a definition of structured data this is how can we define the content on that page in a way that a search engine can grab it when you see this you know what it is because our brains turn out to be very good at recognizing stuff…" }, { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/ai-seo-and-automation-how-to-start-marketing-a-new-product-category-interview-with-joost-de-valk/#breadcrumb", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", 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Interview with Joost de Valk", "description": "", "isPartOf": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/ai-seo-and-automation-how-to-start-marketing-a-new-product-category-interview-with-joost-de-valk/" }, "thumbnailUrl": "https://img.youtube.com/vi/5dRmfaRweOs/maxresdefault.jpg", "embedUrl": "https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/5dRmfaRweOs", "uploadDate": "2025-04-02T00:00:00.000Z", "duration": "PT55M45S", "inLanguage": "en-US", "transcript": "it's a lot harder than it was so let's go back to when I launched y SEO this was now 15 years ago almost when I started uh started coding on that when I started doing SEO and I'm as you can see I'm old we could still look at pit Rank and we could buy links and we could say hey we've gotten this to a pr8 the existential angst that that an entrepreneur needs to some EXT send I guess is lacking hello everyone my name is mai Novak and welcome to the awesome to know podcast where we discuss all things related to building great websites my today's guest is Yos deok maybe best known for building his famous y SEO plugin Yos and his team have recently launched a new product and we are taking this as an example to discuss the cold start problem meaning how do you start marketing a new product category and U building from zero to creating that category we also talk about SEO and how y looks at the current SEO game from his over 15 years of um experience we also touch on on building versus selling software products if you don't want to miss new episodes and keep learning more about building great websites please subscribe to our newsletter at awesome studio.com newsletter this is oomm studio.com newsletter if you are watching this on YouTube give us a thumb and subscribe to our Channel this means our to us without further Ado please enjoy my conversation with Y [Music] the hey everyone it's good to have you here we're glad you decided to tune in for this episode of the awesome to know podcast hello host how are you I'm very good hi thanks for having me yeah my pleasure my pleasure um let's get straight to the you know to questions and I have a very big question for you have you ever been a person of non grata before um well maybe in high school a bit but that no that's I don't even think that's true I do think some of my teacher maybe disliked me but um uh no I I don't think I've ever been in this weird position before where you want to actually change a project for the better for everyone uh and someone responds like this that's I think that is putting you on a you know in a spotlight right like everyone is looking now at you because of being you know put in this position yeah I I guess so and um it you know the thing is I would like for all of us to get along and do and work together in a way that that actually moves us all forward and this makes that harder not impossible I still think but harder yeah not a constructive approach would you say it would not be the approach I would take all right that's very nice nicely um let's maybe like move on to other nice topics I I I don't want you you know to celebrate that no I think the negativity isn't worth a whole lot I I do think that um we all still need to get together and move forward in a in a way that that works for everyone and I still want to do that and I want to include everyone in that and everyone I've been I'm talking to and working with wants the same thing I think we all want to get rid of that negativity and also get rid of the fear that is very palpable in a lot of people because I can say a lot of these things because I don't have all that much to lose in in some ways um so I hope that we'll be able to to get away from that and get to more positive things soon but okay but do you think this is possible like because there is yeah I I I still I still think that's possible if I didn't think that was possible I probably wouldn't have started well I wouldn't have gone into this I went into this quite wide uh Eyes Wide Open knowing that this was one of the risks of what could happen but but I still think that it's very possible to to change this okay all right I'm super curious I and I think like the whole Community is super curious how this will uh evolve because the the longer the situation with the with that conflict like not like not even not like with you but the whole you know problem with WordPress was like boiling now it blew up and the longer that situation is not resolved the more we learn about stuff that happened you know in the past or is happening now or yeah it's it none of it helps anybody I don't think it's good for our Market I think all of us want stability and and then a stable platform that we can all build on um and I also think all of us wants for WordPress to move forward um so yeah I uh I still think that's possible it is not something that you do in a day um and uh well it is made a bit harder by uh the fact that people are afraid to speak up publicly it means that you have to do a bit more in back Chambers which is not really a position that I prefer in many ways I would like to do this more public but it's it's a lot harder because people don't dare to speak up MH yeah and I think rightly so if they are very tightly coupled with uh with the organization technology and you know their livelihood depends on attending ccoms for example right so it's like there is uh you know it's a position of power where uh you can do whatever you want with the contributing members for okay not everything you want but you can make their life extremely more hard for example yes yeah you can all right now we can move to nicer things so uh I think you've been very busy recently like I think I I I I see you've been busy very busy recently building um new product so you can sit still there is ailia capital but then there is also your uh uh a new product you're are building uh for workpl can you tell us a little bit more about the product you know probably you've been asked about this but you know in a nutsh show what what is it and why have you decided to build it so the product is called progress planner um the the idea of the product is that it's hard to maintain a website well and that a lot of people forget both the basic setup tasks and the well the me tasks of Maintenance so we we needed to figure out a way to make that a bit more fun and also a way to keep you working on your website because what we see happen a lot is that people build a website and then spend a lot of time making it better in the beginning H and as they do that um they they start to well work less and less on their site and their site starts to deteriorate and then four years in they actually need to uh need to build a new website because it's also out of date and we want to sort of prevent that and uh and help people do better so do better in terms of keeping their plugins up to date and things like that but also do better in in terms of keeping their about page and their contact page up to date and giving them reminders to do that um and well this it's funny as you if you've been in this space as long as I have then you you can come up with long lists of things that people forget and do wrong in their WordPress site and that we if we can tell them and figure out a way to to give them nudges to do those things better everyone has a better website so that's what progress planner is about it's very much a it takes a lot of uh learnings from du lingo in terms of gamifying how you um um how you do your things and and and gives you badges to to keep stay active on your site and yeah and well with that we try to help you build a better website in in many ways which includes SEO but also a lot of other things like how do you have you removed all the sample content that WordPress comes with for instance um if you look on Google and you you search for the slug of the sample page that ships with WordPress you'll see that loads and loads and loads of companies still have that sample page on their website and there's a whole lot of things like that that would be better if they were removed and fixed M and I I just wanted to comment on the fact that it looks like a sparring partner maybe not a sparring partner but like a personal trainer who keeps you motivated or tells you what to do to stay in shape not get better shape maybe you know not as much but well well we we'll try to even get you in better shape I I I I kind of like that analogy um I I train with a personal trainer three times a week and I have for the last nine years so I know how is how important that can be um so yeah no I I do like that analogy and it is um it is a bit like that where where it tries to be that buddy that that you you um that you help and and that and that that helps you well stay on touch of things because let's be honest most people that um have a website are not like you or me they don't want to maintain a website the website is a thing that they need to do on the side of of all their other stuff um so a bit of reminding every every week that they need maybe should you do one or two small things under side to keep it going well um is probably very welcome M and since this is a new product uh how do you find the you know managing the cold start problem because you know you have to launch a new product how do we go about this um it's hard uh and it's harder than it it's a lot harder than it was so let's go back to when I launched y SEO this was was now 15 years ago almost when I started uh started coding on that um at that point in time there were a lot less plugins the market was a lot less crowded but also the the types of users were a lot more users that looked like me um that that were relatively technical could install a plugin themselves figure out what to do Etc so yosio was built very much with people like that in mind and um over time we slowly progressed that um as my wife ma be came into the company more and we started building more for what I'd Now call average users um and now you start a new WordPress site and you're thrown into a thing and and it's actually hard there's 50,000 plugins out there and I mean like 12,000 of them are maintained but you can't even really diagnose very well without knowing what you're doing which ones are well maintained and which ones are not um so standing out in that market is a lot harder and with yosio we built an SE plugin which people already had an idea of what…" }, { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/anyonecanwp-hackathon-keynote-by-joost-de-valk-from-yoast-seo-and-emilia-capital/#breadcrumb", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://joost.blog/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Videos", "item": "https://joost.blog/videos/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "AnyoneCanWP Hackathon Keynote by Joost de Valk from Yoast SEO and Emilia Capital", "item": { "@id": 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"https://joost.blog/about-me/#/schema.org/Person" }, "copyrightYear": 2024 }, { "@type": "VideoObject", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/anyonecanwp-hackathon-keynote-by-joost-de-valk-from-yoast-seo-and-emilia-capital/#video", "name": "AnyoneCanWP Hackathon Keynote by Joost de Valk from Yoast SEO and Emilia Capital", "description": "", "isPartOf": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/anyonecanwp-hackathon-keynote-by-joost-de-valk-from-yoast-seo-and-emilia-capital/" }, "thumbnailUrl": "https://img.youtube.com/vi/KCfliZK_5Po/maxresdefault.jpg", "embedUrl": "https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/KCfliZK_5Po", "uploadDate": "2024-10-11T00:00:00.000Z", "duration": "PT24M18S", "inLanguage": "en-US", "transcript": "might we live already okay hi everybody I hope you can see us hey good morning good evening and good afternoon to everybody wherever you are uh I'm vikas from in WP and today with us we have yok from Y and Amelia capital hello y thanks for having me Vias it's it's so nice to be here yeah I appreciate it you taking your time today uh and opening us for the keynote for anyone can WordPress uh I think this event is something new for everybody in the WordPress ecosystem and uh something more fun uh like building stuff which we are all fond of um to get started I have a little bit of slide uh and then I will pass it over to you y looking forward to it all right and on the live stream thanks everybody for joining in I really appreciate your time today uh we already have 40 people tuning in I hope we'll have more as we progress so let's get started um again welcome everybody to this event uh this is the beginning of anyone can WordPress which is is uh kindly sponsored by automatic and a bunch of other uh friends companies uh from all over the world so we have automatic Stellar ATM vlob SEO press cocko block food plugins airlift deify security good ID and PX uh most of these companies I think uh people know already and we thank them for their sponsorship this is the world's first uh WordPress online hackathon as we would like to call it um maybe there are more but uh we we don't know that right so and we have about 20 topics to choose from we have kept it very simple uh just choose one of the topic and start building we already have 700 plus teams registered and but it's not late you can register today uh today is actually the commencement of the building process itself so just register and starts start building um I will talk about more on the dates and other uh Logistics at the end of the presentation a brief history about how we started in stwp and how it all led to this event uh my entry into WordPress was about five years ago where I started building a website for my brother for his shop as people do always and uh then I built a e-commerce uh shop sh in prer shop I don't know if you know those is that software is very popular in Europe and then I built a plugin on prer shop and I thought okay this is cool and then slowly discovered WordPress and then started a plug-in in theme shop bootstrap to 30 plus member team and then one day in WP idea came came about so how why why there is no instant website builder so that's what inst was all about you know the history if you are following us uh and then eventually we thought why not do a fun event which is first online and fingers crossed maybe a physical event in years to come so this is how first chapter begin and today we have uh yok from Yost we which I admire and I think a lot of people actually look up to uh because you you are one of the ogs who have made this possible uh that a Plugin or somebody is coming from from mean we we call it like a nobody right me coming from a web developer or any kind of background can make it big I think uh that's the journey we can all follow so um with that I will welcome Yost U to this I we have a small uh introduction about your I know yours may may think this is a little bit of uh uh cheesy but uh yeah here we go so yog is the Visionary behind y SEO one of the most widely used WordPress plug-in globally helping over 13 million websites optimize their SEO ranking hailing from the Netherlands Yos began his journey from uh a webkit developer which is kind of a weird developer generally become people become web developer but B kit is even more core so yeah and quickly becoming an expert in SEO transforming Millions uh who manage their search search optimization on their website he has been an integral part of Wordpress Community Driven by Deep belief in the powerful open source for US Open Source is more than just about software it's about empowering users sharing knowledge and Building Together Beyond his incredible success with Yost SEO uh y continues to make an impact in the tech world through Amelia Capital those who don't know uh uh he supports early stage startups aligned with his passion for Innovation and open- Source principles Emilia Capital enabled us and uh his wife Marik to Mentor the next generation of digital leaders helping them grow and create meaningful products in the ecosystem with progress planner his latest fora into the WordPress plug-in Market us is solving real challenges for website owners by offering tools that boost productivity and organization from his early days as a web developer to his ongoing dedication to making a web a better place a more accessible space your journey is one of the constant innovation let's give a warm welcome to Y everybody oh thank you that wasn't awkward at all Fus no it never I'll never get used to that but it's fine um thank you for the kind words and thank you for having me um no problem yeah let me just adjust this one just yeah go ahead so yeah I uh of all the things you you mentioned I'm a father I'm I'm married to my lovely wife Ma I was the founder of yast which we sold in 2021 um and then I uh became an investor together with my wife as well we invested in many companies I saw atarim is one of the sponsors here well they are one of our portfolio companies I talk to veto the founder almost every week and we're currently building progress planner um you should check it out I think it's fun um we are having fun building it I think that's the most important bit but today um when vus asked me to do this I was like yes this is what we need in WordPress we need fun we need the the fun of building and the fun of really playing with what WordPress can do and what we can do with WordPress so I think it's good to take you back a bit to where this all started uh for me at least and and honestly h l this started with me scratching my own age literally I had a website called css3 info um which was all about CSS I was um basically doing things as a webkit committer I was helping uh build new CSS features and I wanted to show people how they could use these new CSS features on their websites and what that would look like but I wanted to show them and I and I needed these things to be found so I built small plugins plug a plugin called robots meta a plugin called RSS footer a plugin for canonical and all these things I did and then at one point decided to merge them into one big plugin called WordPress SEO that later became y SEO now I was like like this behind my laptop most of the time because honestly I was not a good developer when I started doing this and I think that it's very important when you look at an event like anyone can WordPress that you don't have to be a good developer today you don't have to know it all you don't have to need you don't need funding you don't need backing from anyone you just need to do it all you need is the willingness to learn and learning is super important but it also requires a kind of humility and me talking about humility should be very funny if you know me in person person I'm not normally always the most hum well I'm not very good at that but it but it needs a kind of humility to learn from everyone from your own mistakes from feedback from from everything around you and you need what the Italians call grinta which I love it's a it's grit and dedication and you need to just go at it you need to really make sure that you keep going you learn from your mes and you make the next step and you're going to make mistakes and that's fine because Building Product is hard it is really really hard you can only learn by doing it it's a it's a sort of muscle that you need to that you need to flex you need to train like how do people interact with with software how do people use things I have learned over time that building simple software is probably the hardest thing there is to do it is harder to build simple software than it is to build a a a piece of software with tons of features and uh and checkboxes to enable or disable things it is harder to make it simple and to make the right choices for people so you have to try and you'll fail and failing is fine as as soon as you fail you try again and you try again so fa fast this is something that even the biggest companies in the world still say today at meta if you walk around one of my best friends works there you you'll still see fail fast posters you'll you'll they want you to fail because they know that not every experiment is going to succeed but trying is the only way to getting to success and there's this open-source Mantra that has become a mantra for a very important reason and I I want to urge you to as you go into anyone can WordPress the this period to release early and release often get feedback as soon as you can while building progress planner one of the things we did is we actually sent out my my wife wrote them handwritten cards to a lot of our friends asking them to try progress planner because they get and they gave us tons of good feedback that's what you need you need feed Fe back from people you need to really learn and to see how people interact with your software what they think it is when you give it to them without too much instructions and see where they go and what they do with it because a good product isn't just about good code it's important but it's not the most important thing what's even more important is a good user interface and even more important than that is a good user experience because in the end the experience is is what really matters and it should solve an actual user's problem so find that problem that you want to fix for people it can be your problem that's absolutely fine in fact in most cases I think it it's one of the reasons why people build great software is when they when they solve their own itch when they solve a problem that they really feel is very important but don't go too far in it don't become dogmatic check with every one like is this really…" }, { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/awp-gutenberg-interview-series-with-joost-de-valk/#breadcrumb", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://joost.blog/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", 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"https://joost.blog/videos/eclipsing-33-of-the-web-joost-de-valk-yoast-and-wordpress/#video", "name": "Eclipsing 33% of the Web (Joost de Valk, Yoast and WordPress)", "description": "", "isPartOf": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/eclipsing-33-of-the-web-joost-de-valk-yoast-and-wordpress/" }, "thumbnailUrl": "https://img.youtube.com/vi/v5FLChI_2M0/maxresdefault.jpg", "embedUrl": "https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/v5FLChI_2M0", "uploadDate": "2021-11-21T00:00:00.000Z", "duration": "PT35M28S", "inLanguage": "en-US", "transcript": "[Music] hey folks and welcome back to the wpmrr wordpress podcast as always i'm joe and i'm qui-gon and you're listening to the wordpress business podcast we have a uh og jedi on the podcast hey what's going on qui-gon well i'm still trying to find my next padawan but uh other than that things work quite well as long just make sure the name of your new padawan is not anakin skywalker as long as we can avoid an anakin that turns into darth vader we're going to be all good i i can't make any promises there but we'll see there you go yeah history has already told itself i think we that we have made your selection um very cool to have qui-gon on the pod this week not actually qui-gon jin but we actually have the one and only yost de valk uh and i actually had to ask uh yoast when we jumped on i was like okay then the company's called yoast your name is spelled j-o-o-s-t what's the is it are those the same did as your name different and then you had kind of a funny story behind that yeah yeah it's actually uh a friend of mine now ryan fishkin of moz and now sparktoro we when we first met 12 years ago and uh at a conference in stockholm he asked me hey so how do i pronounce your name and i explained it to him he's like so it's toast with a y and he's like he was saying that to me and and as he said that i was like yes and i turned around and registered joes.com and well that's where it started this is when i started using the nic for myself and later on for the company very nice that's cool that you uh you you know rand pretty well uh i i'm a big fan of of rand and everything that he did at seomoz and now it's bark toro uh and i've also uh read his book a few months ago it's right when it came out uh and honestly couldn't put it down it was one of the most kind of you know you read a lot of stuff in the startup world it's a it's a very good read actually spoke at our conference last week uh and and i was chatting with him like i read your book and then i saw that you got funding for your new company and i couldn't reconcile so uh now he has done that in quite a different way for his new company but it's still it's always funny to to us because at yoast we don't have any funding we've always grown basically on our own cash there's no outside investors whatsoever so it's my wife myself and uh omar and michael our our management team we own the company with the four of us and yeah it's it's weird to me to look at all those dynamics of outside investors and and and all these things it it feels unhealthy yeah i uh wp buffs is similarly bootstrapped uh and not quite the scale of yoast not yet but um i am i feel the same way you know it's so it's so important when you're you know if you're raising money to have really really the same not only the same kind of value structure as the people who are investing in your company but the same idea and where the company is going and even if you do have that i think the chances are still high that you know you're getting into a marriage at that point and it's uh if there's something that's you know they're different thinking between the two parties then there's gonna be trouble down the line and you can you can avoid all that although maybe moving a little bit slower uh if you bootstrap and self-fund i mean now that we're kind of diving into this i have some questions i kind of want to talk about in the interview but the uh now we're talking about this i want to talk about this a little more what did yoast look like at the at the beginning of the company you know 10 years ago uh if that's accurate uh well it's not even it's not even 10 years ago yet so i founded yoast the company in may 2010 basically to do consulting i was doing seo consulting for some of the largest brands in the world and basically started doing that on my own so i had a couple of clients that i could take along from my previous job including ebay so i had a very safe salary based on that but it was just me there was no wordpress seo plugin yet i mean i had some plugins but it was all relatively small and there was certainly no money coming from that and over time i made a lot of money on affiliate for hosting stuff and hired my first employee um hugh who's now one of our partners to help me in doing consulting and then in 2012 we started selling plugins and only early 2014 we started selling wordpress seo premium uh so that's five years ago yeah so that's really four or five years the that uh you've really started to see some you know more financial success i think that's an important lesson for people listening to sometimes it takes time why we were already growing we were doing well i mean we we can seriously could not complain the step from being two people in 2012 to being uh over 100 people now is it was quite a step yeah that is that's it's fast gross growth for a bootstrap company for sure um one that's self-funded you know i think there are a few funded companies out there that's that can can grow that pace but it's that's a very big challenge for someone who or for a company that's self-funded yeah it's it's always cash flow is always a challenge at the same time it's also like that challenge also keeps you on your edge and the fact that there's no unlimited amount of money but you have to make like smart decisions about your money and because otherwise you will not be able to afford what you're so you have to predict all the time like how much of this growth that we've had over the last few months is sustainable we've basically grown between 50 and 70 per year over the last seven years so um i mean that is in many ways ridiculous if you look at it and we've just been all lucky in a way and we were and we were quite quick into a market quite well i think it's always it's a bit more of a challenge when you're completely self-funded and when there's no external money so there's not there's never there has really never been like a couple of million in the bank to to feel free on yes makes it a very a very different story um but cool it's interesting to hear about how yoast came about and um now kind of yourself you're moving in a in a slightly new direction uh you're now the marketing and communications lead for wordpress tell us a little bit about how that transition transpired i just used two keywords uh there's that might be a little confusing how did that all come about uh has it been kind of a little while you've been thinking about this for the last year or so or is this something that's been more recent well now so i've been working on like what is seo for wordpress and what is marketing for wordpress in general for quite a while already matt and i have been talking about that topic for three four years and over time we've been investing more and more time into wordpress as used so last year we had like 10 people working full-time on wordpress core and i started feeling like hey i want to be involved closer myself i've been a fan and user of wordpress for over a decade i feel like i have something to add to the project that developers do not necessarily have to add because we we had marketing but it wasn't really like coming into full free fruition and i it i felt it needed more and more power and well talked to matt about that and um [Music] at a certain point we decided like hey this is um we should probably do this um yeah and that's i mean going into it now has also been very fun because there's a lot of work to do but there's also been such a gigantic positive response from the community from agencies et cetera reaching out and offering design time and uh and help to to fix things on wordpress.org and and more you know in a slightly broader spectrum so we're redesigning the showcase at the moment we've already rewritten like five or six pages on.org that were really old we now have a roadmap that's up to date it's like it's all that simple stuff that feels simple but that i felt needed more attention than it was getting and it's yeah the positive response from everybody has been awesome so i'm it's a lot of work but at the same time it's also i feel like i'm mostly unlocking other people to do the work and yeah i know it's really cool to be able to work on that i think that's a it's an underrated skill of a leader that they unlock the ability of other people to be able to do an awesome job right your job is leading the marketing team is to optimize the whole team it's not just you doing all the work or executing on everything you have a whole team under you to do all that you mentioned the road map which is which is which is pretty exciting i'm sure so a lot of my questions i have today are coming from your blog which is just yoast.blog which it's not yoast y-o-a-s-t it's it's your actual name j-o-o-s-t dot blog so you can check out the blog there for people who want to follow along kind of while you're listening but the road roadmap there's a link to the roadmap there i think the first step for us now is to get wordpress.org to be more reflective of how good a cms wordpress is um i think we're not always doing a very good job telling that story and also of telling the story of which use cases wordpress is good for so that starts with a redesign of some of the corepages on.org and a redesign and refilling of the showcase then i'd like to add an enterprise section to wordpress.org to to highlight a bit more where how wordpress is used in the enterprise and what kind of things there are there because i think it's really undervalued in that area and then on top of that one of the the longer going plans but that'll take a lot of coordination is we have we have all these word camps worldwide and if i can make all those word camps reach one or more journalists that they can actually tell about wordpress and and and tell the story of both wordpress to platform and wordpress the community if i if we can reach that then we'll suddenly have a reach that's like very hard to to beat so i want to really…" }, { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/fixing-wordpress-biggest-problem-supply-chain-security-karim-marucchi-joost-de-valk/#breadcrumb", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://joost.blog/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Videos", "item": "https://joost.blog/videos/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Fixing WordPress’ 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"datePublished": "2025-09-18T00:00:00.000Z", "copyrightHolder": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/about-me/#/schema.org/Person" }, "copyrightYear": 2025 }, { "@type": "VideoObject", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/fixing-wordpress-biggest-problem-supply-chain-security-karim-marucchi-joost-de-valk/#video", "name": "Fixing WordPress’ Biggest Problem - Supply Chain Security | Karim Marucchi, Joost de Valk", "description": "", "isPartOf": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/fixing-wordpress-biggest-problem-supply-chain-security-karim-marucchi-joost-de-valk/" }, "thumbnailUrl": "https://img.youtube.com/vi/1JdR72uOE-k/maxresdefault.jpg", "embedUrl": "https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/1JdR72uOE-k", "uploadDate": "2025-09-18T00:00:00.000Z", "duration": "PT32M4S", "inLanguage": "en-US", "transcript": "Hi, this is your Silhartia and we are here at OpenSource Summit in Denver, Colorado and today we have two guests Karim Marooi CEO at crowd favorite and Yost the Faulk partner at Emilia Capital. Yos Karim, it's great to have you on the show. Thank you. Thank you. It's my pleasure to host you both folks here. Um I would before we talk about the main topic today which is of course fair package manager project before that I would love to know a bit about you know the company crowd favorite and then of course I will talk to you to learn about the immediate capital so let's start with the with the company absolutely so crowd favorite was originally founded to uh install and customize WordPress for the enterprise so over the years we've done everything from uh tech techrunch to um Disney, W uh AT&T, different companies like that. And today we are one of the uh premier customizers of the of the software within the Fortune 500. Excellent. And uh let's talk about Ailia Capital. So I am the before I started Amelia Capital, I founded a company called Yoast, which build a Yoast SEO plug-in for WordPress. uh we sold that in 2021, made some money and started investing into the WordPress space. Uh so been doing that for the last four years. Um mostly because actually in the WordPress space there's relatively little investment into small companies growing up new stuff. So that's what I started doing together with my wife and Yost is one of the most SEO you know if you look at the project you know for the SEO you by default. So is the name came from in your name as yeah is from my name I if I have to give one piece of advice today it would be not to name your company after yourself because if you end up selling your company someone else ends up owning your name. But yeah no Yosio is a quite successful product. uh we sold it to Newfold Digital in 2021. Uh at that time we had about 12 million websites using it and I think right now it's at 13 14 million websites running that software. Yeah, it's a quite successful open-source project. No, I I do know actually it add one more kind of you know exciting element to this discussion today. Uh which actually creates a very good good segue to the fair package manager looking at your roots when you actually introduce yourself. I had something in the back of but I didn't want to ask like that may be unrelated alto together. Uh so I would like to start that uh the fair package manager project talk about the origin of the project where and why it started. WordPress has historically and it's WordPress is a 22-year-old open source project right and it has historically always worked in a way where every WordPress site connects to WordPress.org to get its updates for WordPress itself, its plugins, its themes, its translations, and a whole lot more. Um, over the course of the well, the end of last year, there was a lot of kurfuffle in our industry when there were a couple of things that happened. At one point, WordPress.org decided to block one of the biggest hosts in the WordPress ecosystem from accessing WordPress.org, which prevented all of their customers from updating their plugins, themes, and WordPress itself. And then a couple days, weeks later, um, one of the plugins on WordPress.org, so an independent open source project was taken over and supplanted by a fork of that project by the WordPress.org uh owner as well. And at that point we as an as an ecosystem all began looking like hey we know that we we weren't always happy with how governance and the WordPress ecosystem worked and how the work why their WordPress ecosystem was run. Um but we really started going like hey we need other solutions. Um, I was looking at it from an investment perspective like this is an entirely unsafe ecosystem to invest in and Kareem had had similar problems with with my day-to-day clients. We had major Fortune50 clients saying, \"How can we trust a open- source project that can just decide to replace code? What happens if they didn't decide to actually announce it publicly? It's a supply chain security nightmare and this must be fixed.\" And we were not alone. There were quite a few people that uh were talking about this and were different groups that were forming like, hey, we need to do something else. And um we both wrote a a blog post at the end of December last year where we said, hey, we need this to change and we have an idea of how to change this. because we could afford to be public about this. Uh a lot of people started contacting us and we luckily were able to connect all these groups together. Um and with all of us together decide like hey we're going to move this forward in in one direction which is where we started with fair. So fair technically is both a protocol and an implementation of that protocol which replaces WordPress.org. it. All these hosts started setting up mirrors when this happened, but all those mirrors were built by themselves and and were basically still dependent on WordPress.org. And what we did with fair is that all these mirrors become repositories of themselves and they connect to each other. So we have this federated network where if one of the uh nodes is cut off from access to WordPress.org, or we can actually route around that like the internet and and create a more stable version of of our supply chain for everyone. In doing so, we've also actually fixed a lot of other problems that we have in the WordPress ecosystem. So, historically, themes and plugins were only findable in the WordPress admin if they were hosted on WordPress.org. We've built a new aggregator service that actually allows plugins and themes to be hosted outside of WordPress.org, which allows for an entire commercial ecosystem to be created on top of that, which did already exist a bit, but it was very hard to be found by users because you could not be found in the in the WordPress admin. If they searched for a plugin, they would only find the free plugins on WordPress.org, but they couldn't find the commercial plugins. So in all of that, fair is a a a project, a protocol, a a a client, a server, and well, it's a lot of work. So today on stage, we announced, hey, we we're setting up a foundation with the Linux Foundation to get funding for all that work we're doing and to make sure that we can govern this together with the wider ecosystem so that instead of the one entity that now controls WordPress.org, will replace that with actual governance um that well allows us all to decide together where we take this. I remember early days Drupal used to be there, Jumla used to there are ton of and WordPress was infamous for being the most insecure one also because it was less about insecurities but a lot of users were there on but the way Drupal was overly complicated you know to run Drupal you have I mean you need a whole data center to run Drupal so but then you folks as you also rightly mentioned auto updates which made a because a lot of folks were not updating you know you know they're like five generation behind those plugins and it it went to the same old software supply chain. a patch was there, it was never applied. But I think that we not entirely fixed that problem yet. But what I'm saying is but the open source get the bad rap. People don't think that hey the patch was not applied. The news cycle will say hey you know what the biggest vulnerability found on WordPress. No it was fixed but nobody applied the patch. Can you talk about first of all when you conceptualize the fear project? First of all the fear is in upper case. Is there any specific connotation meaning behind the name as well? Yeah, so fair stands for um federated and independent repositories and the idea was when we first started talking we were seeing the reaction of what was happening with WordPress.org The hosts were putting up these mirrors and each individual host was doing their own technology to do that. And with a open- source project that has 40% of the web today, imagine each different host having different ways to do updates, the problem you were just speaking about would get worse and worse and you wouldn't have the same experience across all the hosts. So the conversation we had and then brought in other groups as well was how do we make it so we can create a common foundation that keeps the open-source project together. One thing is also unique about WordPress is that of course I can host it on a I can host it on digital ocean wherever I want and then WordPress.com you know you can get you know full you know uh what is the involvement of automatic is it automatic right with the project or not yet they are involved they they're not involved yet we'd love them to be um we've invited them we've we've invited them but um yeah so far there's been no real response Um, of course it there is a bit of a a struggle there in that there are a lot of entities around WordPress. There there is Automatic. There's the founder of WordPress who's also the CEO of Automatic and the leader of the project who's also the owner of WordPress.org which is his private website. So there is a lot of well stuff around that that makes it harder for the wider ecosystem to to do this properly which is actually one of the problems that we're running into as well because with the cyber resilience act in Europe coming up the fact that WordPress.org is a privately owned website which is not an open- source foundation is actually a problem. So we needed that we needed to fix that. We do fix that in in large part with what we've built with fair and what we're building with fair because not all of it's done yet. Um the protocol is pretty much okay but not all of the code has been written to do all the federation. 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things that people you know rave about and rant about is the traffic light system that you created which obviously is a very easy get but also I've seen people lose their mind over the fact that they can't get the green lights do you still a fan of your traffic light system do you think you should have more colors in it what we are working on is to make it slightly more like Google so to make it we for the longest time we've we've refer to one focused keyword and we've we've been slightly too keyword based the problem is that getting away from keyword based is very hard the way we run the analysis so what you have to realize that we run all that analysis in your browser so that doesn't run anywhere else that runs in JavaScript in your browser doesn't go to our servers so we what we had to do was figure out how to become better at that while not blowing up your browser um so we're very close to a major release of the SEO in which we will move from key word to key phrase and in which we will move from single like will only recognize it if it's in exactly that order to recognizing it in more different shapes and forms and automatically recognizing florals for instance of singles and things like that that has taken about a year's worth of development and for language scientists in our team to get well and we've got it done for English now yeah oh it's up to us to done expand it to all the other languages well the thing is I think what people like about Yoast is its simplicity you know the focus keyword still talks about keyword density which always kind of makes me feel a bit itchy that's one of the things that goes away with that yeah go away it's just that we talk about it differently yes I the the funny thing is that in the SEO world you've got two groups of people you've got two people that don't want to talk about queue or don't see because it's better and you shouldn't talk about talk about that that's all the people doing SEO in English and then if you're doing SEO in languages that Google is not as good at then Kirra density suddenly becomes very important so this is a finger there's really three four five different types of content SEO depending on how how proficient Google is at recognizing your language their large maturity of the documentation about SEO is in English and about English language SEO but even for me that's not my native language and when I write in Dutch Dutch is a very small language area there's only number twenty five million people in the world that speak Dutch there's like ten million web sites in Dutch so there's a lot of stuff to be ranked for in Dutch where the ranking algorithm is actually different from the English one and were keyword density unfortunately matters more than it does in English it's a hard story to to tell and it's especially as we are worldwide and we have uses on every continent it it is like yeah what do you optimize [Music]" }, { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": 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Talk Live", "description": "", "isPartOf": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/joost-de-valk-founder-and-ceo-of-yoast-seo-plugin-for-wordpress-search-talk-live/" }, "thumbnailUrl": "https://img.youtube.com/vi/1EKqSaQnCAo/maxresdefault.jpg", "embedUrl": "https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/1EKqSaQnCAo", "uploadDate": "2016-02-02T00:00:00.000Z", "duration": "PT53M41S", "inLanguage": "en-US", "transcript": "[Music] yeah welcome to search talk live with search engine optimization and marketing experts robertto hver and Caleb mckelvin powered by the Robert Palmer family of companies good afternoon and welcome to another episode of search talk live with me today is Caleb mckelvin my co-host Caleb how's it going doing great man happy to be back for another show and I think we got a really good one in store today for our listeners a lot of good information and an awesome guest yeah yeah um what uh just to give you guys if you're first time listening I want to give you a little bit of information on the show we are search talk live we talk about nothing but digital marketing search engine optimization uh social media yeah social media conversion optimization all that good stuff yes uh anything that's happening with Google we talk about that or Bing yep uh and uh yeah Yahoo Yahoo Yahoo yeah we're search talk live uh we are powered by the Robert Palmer family companies you can go to Robert Palmer companies.com check that out we really appreciate them helping us here at search talk live and uh all they do for us but yeah let's get this thing started Rob well I want to tell everybody where they can hear us at um you can get the show on iTunes you can download it from your iPhone uh spreer which is another uh where we disseminate all the information from uh you can get us uh where else the website search talk.com talk.com yeah got all the info on there yeah but today I'm really excited we have a guest um probably one of the most downloaded plugins in the WordPress hemisphere yes um we have yoast yes Mr Yos Devol yes is that are we pronouncing that right J Dev you're actually pretty good for an American well see I'm American and I'm Southern so that's kind of like a double whammy so it's kind of hard to to pronounce some things but yos deoc how you doing today we appreciate you joining us I'm I'm doing very fine glad to glad to be here yeah it's pretty cool you're in the Netherlands right yes wow we are in in this this tiny country with uh well it's it's it's probably as big as the state of New York or something yeah W well what's the temperature there uh it's currently 4 degrees Celsius outside I I don't even know what that is in terms of it's the same when you go past zero pretty much y'all are pretty cold there yeah it's a that's 39.2 Fahrenheit yes so you're cold we got a little better over here nice and sunny Florida so doing good don't even get me start so uh yo we kind of want to start out uh our listenership we have from experienced SEO to digital marketing to people that are just getting into the industry to kind of small business owners wanting to learn more uh can we you just give us a little bit about your background uh you know uh how you got started and currently what you're doing okay um so I started out in SEO approximately 10 years ago um coming from a variety of IT background so I I walked into an SEO job um became a consultant uh rather quickly uh started blogging about SEO and became a speaker on the international circuit and um from there about five year five and a half years ago now I started my own company uh doing SEO for rather big Brands I was doing at that time companies like km and eBay Etc um and so I did that for a while had started developing WordPress plugins as a hobby on the side and the hobby turned into more of a nuessence because is that we I had over a million users and that filled my inbox far too quickly right so uh well basically got told by my wife that I needed to do something about that um and she was right in many ways so started to to look at okay how can we monetize this can we build a company around this so the company i' started was in the beginning mostly Consulting and just me uh and then uh from 2012 onwards we started doing premium plugins uh and we've grown tremendously since so uh I started in 2010 hired my first employee in 2012 and there's 37 of us now oh wow uh so yeah it's been uh a bit of growth and we are indeed one of the uh our SEO plugin Yos SEO for WordPress is probably in the top three downloaded plugins for WordPress at any given time how many how many would you say downloads has been I you don't care sharing well downloads is a a public number but doesn't really say that much uh because every new download on a site that's already active counts as a new download uh we know that we've got in between 4.5 and 5 million active uh sites wow jeez uh and we know that uh according to Bill with.org um of the top 1 million websites out there uh over 8% uses are plugin that's not just WordPress sites that's the top 1 million sites overall wow that's incredible so yeah the impact to that is to be honest even to us still ridiculous yeah absolutely and you look at those numbers and you just go like uh oh ouch yeah right yeah um well I'm goingon to let you do a little bit of a sales pitch here um somebody just getting started because we we've spoke with many of our listeners and you know some meetup groups that we have people just getting a WordPress up you know how do they get it started and stuff why would somebody and you know I'll let you put it in your own words why would somebody uh just getting started that doesn't necessarily doesn't know that much about SEO yet why would they need this plugin and how is it going to help their site so what we strive to do is we strive to take all of the technical problems away from you and just fix them for you and so you you install the plugin and we take care of a lot of things automatically um that's honestly something we don't talk about much and probably should talk about more ourselves right um and then we give you when you're writing a new post or page we give you a box below that uh the below your input fields we give you a box where you can say okay so what's the word that you would like to rank for with this post and then based on what you put in there we give you Fe back on okay if you want to rank for that term you should do this this this and this yeah um those are what has become known as our green bullets um and if you look at our Twitter stream you'll see people go like yeah I got all greens and uh stuff like that which is awesome so we're we're we we're basically trying to gamify you into writing well seed content right gotcha now do do youall see any challenges as far as there's a lot of seos out there that says well don't necessarily focus on keyword specific uh you know focus on you know what's what's the uh individual looking for the US you're looking for kind of what's their intent uh and they're kind of saying stay away from you know don't worry about the green bullets don't worry about all this I mean is there something you can say to that because it's still something you might need to focus on but a lot of people are saying you know you can ignore that you can still focus on you know that's not necessarily good SEO your your first and and the first and foremost thing that we tell you all the time if you read our blog posts and and and everything that we put out there in terms of uh content is focus on good content good quality well-written stuff right H and and make sure thato is a part of your thinking but don't necessarily change that all that much because you think that that's better for your SEO so we're not going to tell you to get like a 4% keyword density or stuff like that yeah um I I think what he's referencing is because of the green light goes off of exact match phrase uh how many times it shows up you know in in a in a article or whatever it may be um that not necessarily focus on that exact match phrase maybe variation of that abely true um the this is the reason why recently when we updated to our latest version We introduced a multiple keyword functionality in our premium plug-in where you can actually do um where you could put in synonyms uh so you could you could optimize for several terms at the same time and we're working hard on making that analysis even better right um the problem is that we're doing texal analysis in JavaScript so we have some technical um boundaries huh yeah we have some technical boundaries and we didn't exactly have the this serve the computing power that Google has right um at the same time and this might sound very um weird to a lot of seos um but Ciro density does still work especially if you're non- English sure uh in in in countries like the Netherlands or in Germany or in France or Spain Etc having a somewhat higher keyword density does actually uh very often help uh with uh ranking so you you'll need the exact term of course you can r bank for specific terms without having that exact term in your content but you're making it an awful lot harder for yourself yeah sure so um that's why we still ask for that keyword and we still do matching on that specific keyword in headings in in your content in your first paragraph but if you're doing more phrase like stuff I'm the first to tell you that that probably doesn't uh always translate into the best uh scores in our in our plugin because we just come and do that from a Computing perspective right gotcha okay well if you don't mind I mean we saw I mean we've been since that recent update you've done a couple months ago the it I love it it's it's made a huge difference yeah I think so uh just it's funny there's a couple of people that hate it um the especially the real time bit of it um it's honestly um and and please don't uh think I'm bragging but it's honestly a bit like when Facebook changes timeline yeah yeah right exactly because you're running on like five million websites and you that probably means that there is on average about 10 million different people looking at our interface over the course of a month right um can't please everybody right you're right and yeah we've basically given up on pleasing everybody and it just doesn't work like that so we're doing what we think is best um and at the same time…" }, { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/joost-de-valk-holistic-seo/#breadcrumb", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://joost.blog/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Videos", "item": "https://joost.blog/videos/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Joost de Valk: Holistic SEO", "item": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/joost-de-valk-holistic-seo/" } } ] }, { "@type": "WebPage", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/joost-de-valk-holistic-seo/", "url": 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drafty Google what was the aha moment for like I have to create the yoast SEO plugin that even we use at 20vc I started as an SEO consultant having my own website doing some small things and I built a couple of different small plugins at its various specific SEO things and I was is a quite regular speaker at SEO conference already by that time and I and people kept saying to me like yeah well we just want one plugin that does it all and um there was one plug-in out there that that tried to do that but wasn't really good enough yet so I just combined what I had the different plugins that I had into one thing um and then realized quite quickly that there's basically two sides SEO right you have the technical stuff and you have the content side of things and the technical stuff is not something that anyone wants to think about so I what I try to do and I think we've quite successfully done over the years is take all the technical stuff away from people and just fix it for them and give them good feedback on their content I think that that is what well this pretty simple recipe that has actually helped it grow so much and I love it you have the the green red orange light system yeah which was like images needed uh meta description uh whatever whatever I I love it so I'm totally I'm not technical person who loved that but there's a moment when it changes from like a hobby that's kind of cool and kind of working to like oh wow we actually have something what was that Catalyst for I need to go all in on this what was side hobby at the time so I started my own company in 2010 basically doing consulting I was working for Alex doing consulting for Facebook and and doing consulting for eBay and getting companies like that what happened is that the plugin became really big so it had like a million users WordPress was growing quite fast and I suddenly had on this free plugin that I built as a hobby a million users and I was spending way too much time supporting it and my wife was quite clear Marika has been at the criminal at the premise of a whole lot of these smart decisions in life um she she was like I don't need to make money doing this all you need to stop doing it and I'm like yeah you're probably right um and then I built I first started with an add-on so I built a video SEO add-on um I had a small business plan for it I was like if I'm going to make 100k with this in the first year then it's actually worth continuing doing this because I was making quite a lot of money as a consultant so it had to actually offset that money and that I made more than 100K in the first months and I was like oh wait there might be a bit more to this I absolutely love that yeah um do you have that moment though then as the next moment you first have that Catalyst for oh [ ] this is something that's working and working well when you're doing 100K in a month pretty quickly listen Shannon taught me one thing well he told me many things but he told me VC gonna VC uh and what he means about that is you can't take the VC out of the vcn so when you're doing 100K a month you're having people chase you down to invest why did you never take external funding why would we so the thing is we were growing quite so first of all I don't think that any of this was a plan up front I mean there was no plan to to sell the company there was no plan to grow to as big as we as we became because it just happened and we grew along with WordPress and um with Matt in many ways and and and we were very lucky in a way that I I picked the right platform in the beginning and and built on that um but in the beginning it was very much about turning that hobby into a bit of a lifestyle business we have four children I was also spending a lot of time with them um and I didn't necessarily want to build a huge business in the beginning and then later on when we realized that we that we had quite a large business in their hands by that time it really wasn't needed anymore we were generating enough cash to grow in into what we wanted to do um the funny thing about our sort of businesses that you the only cost that you really have is people uh so why why take money is there nothing that you could have done with cash that you didn't do be it marketing be it brand be it r d push the boundaries on how fast you're moving a lot of the times Founders will say the reason I took family is because I could could have done it in 18 months but with cash I can do it in six yeah so I think I was blissfully unaware of that in the beginning and I'm very happy that I was I I think delusion wise you're absolutely right if you could turn the clock back 10 years or to 2010 when you saw it and Incorporated what would you do differently the thing is in with hindsight it's very easy to say that right it's very easy to say I would have done this or that differently had I known in the beginning that we'd be selling the company at some point and and how this all would go I might have hired a bit less people and and but because we a whole lot of the things that we did we did just because we thought it was fun and not necessarily because we were thinking about how to like make the most money um if you if I look you know at it and back at it and maybe we hired a bit too much at certain points in time and and also right now we we're really not that big Theo's as a company is not that big anymore uh in terms of or any more it's not it's a hundred people but if you look at like 13 million websites uh having 120 or so people is really not all that much people right uh so um I would probably say that I don't have any real big regrets in that regard lesson a life without many regrets is a good life I I want to start on the first major topic because when we chatted before you said you know alongside Matt really it's the first time we've had an open source and kind of freemium uh OG on the show and I want to start with something you said which is open source slash freemium models are extremely hard to make work but when they do they lead to incredible potential which VCS are underestimating um let's break that down because I'm simple as a VC um why are open source and premium models so hard to make work first so there's two two sides to that on the one hand freemium is always going to be hard because you have to decide about um what what to put in free and what to put in premium like how do you attract the most users and at the same time get have enough in premium to um you know to actually convert them into paying customers and the add-on thing that's hard there when you're in open source is that when people think that you're you've you've got a good product but too much of its premium is that it might just Fork your premium product uh and so so you have to be extremely good at what you do and you'll also have to build like a sort of trust relationship with that with the customer so you have and the user uh they need to trust you to be better than the other options that are out there and what I said we have relatively few people compared to the number of people using your CEO so what you what you get quite quickly with these models is that you have web skill problems and small company income uh I mean at its peak yoast was a 15 million euros a year Revenue when we sold that's not a whole lot of money compared to the 11 million sites that we were running on at that time I mean that is so you're solving problems for a whole lot of sites with relatively little people at the same time the open source Community controls a large part of the web like a very very large part I think people still underestimate what Matt has done with WordPress and how I mean more than 40 of websites on the web are WordPress sites and companies like Shopify and I heard your podcast with uh with Toby which was awesome but Shopify has like two three percent of of the market if that so WordPress is way way bigger and and people underestimate that and it's under invested in I think what would you do differently if you on that I wouldn't work so hard no I I don't think that's fair I think I have a tremendous respect for what a Matt has done with automatic um I think so for me WordPress to project is super important to me as a person which I think Ma has to has as well like he he'd be happy doing that until he dies and for me it's just like whatever I'll do I'll be in the WordPress community and I think that that is something that he's built that that is so much more powerful than all the other things it's that community and those people we we often say come for the software stay for the people uh and I think that's very true you mentioned that the challenge of putting enough greatness in the free that they convert to the premium and then I'm happy with it when you have Founders come to you with this problem I don't know what to do I don't know how much to put in how much Secret Sauce what do you actually advise them because I'm sure you see so many um we do see a lot and I'm it diff it really differs it's there is no one-size-fits-all solution uh I will say that putting too much in free early on is dangerous because you can't really take it back and uh that I think that's where open…" }, { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/joost-de-valk-making-sure-your-content-is-found/#breadcrumb", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://joost.blog/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Videos", "item": "https://joost.blog/videos/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Joost de Valk: Making sure your content is found", "item": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/joost-de-valk-making-sure-your-content-is-found/" } } ] }, { "@type": "WebPage", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/joost-de-valk-making-sure-your-content-is-found/", "url": "https://joost.blog/videos/joost-de-valk-making-sure-your-content-is-found/", "name": "Joost de Valk: 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"uploadDate": "2026-03-13T00:00:00.000Z", "duration": "PT38M19S", "inLanguage": "en-US", "transcript": "Seriously, Bud is brought to you by Omnisend. Omnisend is a top choice for email and SMS marketing on WordPress. Perfect for Woo Commerce shops. Easily connect with customers and send out awesome campaigns every day. We'll be back in a bit to tell you about our other friendly sponsors. Hello, my name is Bri and welcome to Seriously Bud, a podcast featuring an unexpected conversation with someone from the WordPress community. And now it's time for our host, my dad, Bun Krauss. Thank you, Bri. You know, I had so much fun last week speaking with Balfo Malloy that I thought I would do this all over again. and I'll be back at the end to give you my thoughts about this week's episode. It's number 98. So, here we go. Yost Devulk, welcome to Seriously, Bud, you have no idea how long I have been waiting to talk to you. So, let's start out with somebody we know in common, and that's Taco. Taco Venshot. Did I say that? Yes, it's hard. Okay. Yeah, it's very hard. So, you and Taco are childhood friends now. Not childhood, but we've known each other for a long time. We actually went to the same high school. Actually, the same high school that my brother went to and that Omar, the former CTO of Yoast, went a few more people. I've known Taco for I'd seen him before. He's been working with us now for for 13 years, but we weren't really friends before that. I knew of him, but that wasn't. But you guys grew up in the same town. Yeah, we did. We grew up around the same larger city, Na. And I grew up in a very shitty little town. He did too, but one. And yeah, I mean, we we went to the same school. We have we share a lot of background. Yes, I know. And I know you're good friends today. And in fact, one of the reasons why I'm interviewing you is because first I met Ma through Taco and then I met you through Ma. you know how this works and I did know that you guys were friends from way back. Yeah. No, so yeah, we've honestly he started working at Yoast I think in 2012 or 2011. So it's so we've been working together for a long time. Yeah. And not I shouldn't say surprisingly I should really say not surprisingly there's a large WordPress community in the Netherlands largely because well I don't know if it's just us. There's just qu there's quite a few people who have been active in the WordPress community for a long time. People like Remus. I don't know if you've ever had Rem. Of course, Remus, of course. I love that guy. I was I think one of the organizers of the first word campel together with Remus and a few other people. I I'm trying to think of the names, but it's been so long. So, I it's not just us. I think it helps that we grew a relatively big company out of it. So, that has definitely done something. Yeah, for sure. Because I'm always amazed at how many people Anamika Boallet is somebody that has been on the show. Yeah, there's lots of people that have just come out and I I have never been, believe it or not, to the Netherlands. I know you're missing out. Yeah. Yeah. I I will eventually get there. It's there's a lot of fun stuff to travel to in the world. So, I don't So, I Yes, but I've heard Amsterdam is beautiful and I should see it. You should definitely also see the other parts of the Netherlands. I Amsterdam is very nice, but it's also very touristy. And there are other parts of the Netherlands that are just as nice and not as touristy. Okay, which reminds me, should I come to Now I'm going to say it wrong, V. Our small little our small quaint little town that has three WordPress companies. Wow. Amazing. Yes and no. It's fun. It's quaint. It's relatively small. Name the larger city we're close to where my that high school we talked about earlier is slightly bigger is actually the oldest city in the country. So it's an old Roman city. Oh. So yeah. No, there there's a lot of fun stuff. There's a lot of cool stuff to go around and look at. I'll bet. I'm sure there is. And it sounds I'll have to go. Do you have any siblings? Any brothers? I have a brother and a sister. My brother used to actually work at Yos 2. He was actually its CEO for a while. Was he the C? Did you say CO? CEO. After after MA and Uhuh. And my sister lives on the other side of the country. We don't see each other very often. And your parents, what did your parents do? So my father worked in you call that? Oh god. This is what sometimes my English leaves me and this is one of those moments. Turns out it's not my native language. No. So in in in international Yeah. How do you say that? In helping poor countries around the world basically development. Did he work for an NGO? Yeah, for NOS's. Yeah. Okay. And my mother was a relational therapist. So she helps people stay married or leave each other without too much fighting. Yeah, that's And were was she trained? Yeah, she was. I think she was. Funny enough, both of my parents were by background. They both studied theology, which a large part of my family did, which is why I started studying that at some point, too, and then utterly failed at ever doing anything meaningful in university. That reminds me, I've heard that you did go to university for a little bit. A tiny bit. Really? I like what? Well, no, I was subscribed for much longer. It didn't do much. No. Yeah. I don't really fit into traditional learnings. So when you left university, what happened? Um I started working for a Java development company as an account manager at first but also doing some coding. Then went to a hosting company, was a sales manager there for a while. Then Maria got pregnant with our first kid. I was relatively young. Now hold on. I got to hold on. I have to interrupt you. She got because I know the story. She got pregnant two years before you got married. Uh, yes. Yes, we are progressives here in Okay. But I think it's really interesting that that seems to be custom in the Netherlands that you have your children first and then you get married or is that No, I don't think there's necessarily a custom either way. I don't think getting married is a requirement here in any way. We are not a rulesbased society. Yeah, we are. We don't go to church. We and most people in the Netherlands don't. So it's not and yet those things don't matter here as much. Is this why children in the Netherlands are the happiest children in the world? Is this why? Um I don't really know to be honest. I do think that they have a pretty good life. We tend to not try and pressure them too much. I think and at the same time yeah I don't really know. These are the questions that you should ask my wife who's actually a sociologist and I don't I've answered all this stuff. If I want to hear what Oh, we did talk about it. I don't think she me. No, I they kids in the Netherlands have a good life. I will say that. Now, speaking of something that she and I did talk about and I have to get your side of the story here is how did the two of you meet? Now, I know her side. What's your side? This how did we meet? This was at the European Youth Parliament where I was a committee member. I think I was chair my own country thingy and she was a one of the chairs presiding over the meeting and yeah there was there were sparks and that's what I want to know and then we met later like years later we met again and uh well she saw a picture of you that was taken at the conference at the European Union the model and she says he's a nice boy and then you oh yeah you remembered You rem we met and then you remembered who she was and she was totally freaked out by that. Oh yeah. I had definitely not forgotten her. Yeah. No. Yeah. No, it's it's not a story I tell daily, but it is Yeah, it is. No. Yeah. So, that that is what it was. And it's it was it was it's always been good. Yeah. It's been romantic. It's been good. She said that she had never disclosed how the two of you met on my show, so I have to bring it up again. when we when I interviewed her, I had just had to bring it up in here. She said, \"Ask Yos what he thinks of that story or his side.\" That that was Yeah. I think I think we tell pretty much the same story. I wouldn't know why. And did you start dating at a certain point you dated? Yeah. So, a couple years later, we rem, right? And then we started dating. And what did her parents think of you? It's such a long time. Yeah. I've always had a very good relationship with their parent with their parents. So, I don't really think that there Yeah, that I don't think there was much trouble in that regard. Yeah. Speaking of trouble, when you were in high school, I'm just trying to picture like what you would be like in high school. Were you annoying? Tell me. Annoying. In what way? Were you annoying? Arrogant. Talkative. Really? Did you have a lot of friends? No, I had a good amount of Yeah. It's Yeah. I know. I think I I was probably annoying to my teachers mostly. Were you inquisitive? Did you ask a lot of questions? I liked to debate. Well, that's interesting. That I don't know that I was too inquisitive besides that. Now, I jump back and forward. So if you think there's any like rhyme or reason just whatever comes up like any conversation. So you worked for this Java development company and you were learning Java I'm assuming way. Yes. And then when did the transition come about? How did it come about? Say WordPress that's for me. There must have been. So there was a point where I moved from that Java company to a hosting company. at that hosting company. They gave me a Mac because everyone who worked there had a Mac and I needed to start working and I'd been dabbling with some code for quite a while. I'd been coding since I was 12. And when I got that Mac, I started playing around in my first open source project. This was a project called Open Darwin, which is still like the BSD layer underneath Mac. I started being active there and from there later on also in the WebKit community which is the rendering core of Safari which later turned into Chrome as well. 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and gentlemen i'm proud to present a tech bound podcast interview with jose falk yours needs no introduction but for the few people who don't know him yost is the founder and chief product officer of yoast the well-known seo plug-in that he started in 2010 and that employs more than a hundred people by now jose is also an investor together with his wife marika in companies like peerby student.com or wordproof in this excellent conversation jose and i speak about improving the web the status quo of the cms market share and the importance of schema markup don't skip a beat make sure to listen to the end give me five stars and enjoy this outstanding conversation with mr yosterfolk three two one mr yost welcome to the show thank you thanks for having me it is a delight to have you on uh yes you are running a semi-annually cms market share analysis give us a little bit of a context why do you do that and what are the bigger trends that you have seen lately so i do that because it's very hard to to get good numbers on hey who is using what and how are these cms is doing and just how how is the web progressing what's what's happening out there because there are some there are a couple of tools out there that that do an analysis on which website is built with what software and basically what you want is an overview of hey what's what's changing here and who's doing what and how big is a market share for wordpress how big is a market share for shopify for wix for squarespace for all these companies that are well doing well in in a way i mean these are all companies or ecosystems that that are growing but there are when those are growing growing others are shrinking and why and what's happening in that regard etc so i started looking into this when i was preparing to and gearing up to doing more marketing for wordpress itself so wordpress.org um but i just kept on doing it because it was actually very insightful for us and for the for our business as well to see like hey what are the trends which which systems are doing well and when you go into that you figure out that they're that well in in reality there's only a couple of systems really doing well um like four or five of them doing reasonably well and a lot of them doing very poorly which in a way is good news because let's face it when i started on the web we probably had more cms's than we had people on the web and uh i don't know that that is necessarily a good thing i think it's a good thing that that slowly the web is moving towards a few large systems in many ways whereby a few can still be a hundred different systems i'd be fine with that but not tens of thousands because i don't think that's good for anyone well you can see that progress and and of course i'm mostly a wordpress guy myself and well wordpress is doing incredibly well in those stats but admittedly also the stats have have a tendency to well to lag and also to show only the biggest sites on the web and not and and with that not be a true reflection of the entire web yeah i think it's fair to say and the the progress of wordpress is really stunning i think it's uh you probably have the most up-to-date numbers but it's more than 33 percent at this point of the web running on wordpress yeah it's it it's even closer to 42 which in my mind is just mind-boggling i mean but this is also where it becomes problematic because i'm fairly certain it's not 42 percent of all websites but it is 42 of the top 10 million websites which is two very distinctly different things because there are so many websites out there nobody really knows how many websites are there really are so that makes all of this a bit harder to well to guesstimate well but yeah i think we're at 41.5 at the moment why do you think wordpress has been so successful like why why are they dominating so hard i think it's a combination of relatively low cost of ownership wide availability of developers and versatility and ease of use in the end i think any system that wants to compete on the web for anything whether it's cms or anything else ease of use is probably the biggest thing yeah absolutely true and i'm a wordpress user myself uh my site runs a wordpress and i think easy use is certainly one factor modularity is another factor right it's a very moldable product you can really make it into whatever you need whether it's a web shop or a cms or just a blog or even a small little web app you can you can run a lot of things on wordpress right i totally agree with you i think also the rise of of products like squarespace wix and probably even shopify right they all speak to almost this no-code trend where you make it very easy for somebody to set up a site or even a business without them knowing how to code because let's face it most people are probably not as technical uh as as you and me are no and i think that's also the the danger of wordpress in a way um that you need to be fairly technical to maintain a wordpress site properly that's why some of the um the sas offerings are doing so well and why people are switching to them sometimes because well if i compare running a shopify site to a woocommerce site or running a simple marketing site on uh squarespace versus running that on wordpress it's a lot simpler to do it wrong on wordpress than it is to do on those other platforms so it's a lot easier to shoot yourself in the foot and and and that is the challenge that wordpress has and how yeah in in how people use it is to how do you tell them that they're actually breaking things or not doing it right and how can we help them prevent them from doing that but it's yeah it is i mean if you look at the the market share so number wordpress is the number one in the market with 41.5 and if you look at those stats it's really staggering because shopify is doing incredibly well as the number two in the market but it has 3.5 of that market share versus the 41.5 that wordpress has so it's it's it's such an incredible difference in size absolutely and you already mentioned a couple like you mentioned like showing yourself in the foot and the challenges that some webmasters face and i think you build a company with yoast that that fills a huge gap on the market and really solves one of the biggest pain points for people on wordpress and other uh cmss as well right which is which is seo and making seo a bit more um actionable and tangible um talk to me a little bit about the biggest challenges that you see webmasters face we already talked about that you know to maintain the site you need to be fairly technical like what else do you think are the word which you see as the main challenges that webmasters have today well i think the biggest challenge depends a bit on what type of webmaster you are but if you've had a website for say a decade now and you've been on the web the entire time you've been writing etc then your website is now probably becoming old and a bit sluggish and you need to start cleaning up you need to do some spring cleaning and um so for older sites you see more of this happening because well there as the web grows more and more sites reach that age um at the same time you also have still have a lot of people coming onto the web and building new sites and they're just wondering what they need to do so so they have this site and then you have a wordpress site you've made it looks like something that you are reasonably okay with or your web developer has done that for you and then what if you at that point don't start actually doing stuff online and marketing and promoting and writing content responding on other people's websites or twitter feeds or facebooks or whatever but if you don't seek out the interaction and if you're not urged to do that then it becomes brochure where then it's literally your company brochure on the web and that's it i think the biggest challenge is to actually keep people working on their site and keep on improving it to actually make this whole process into something that is a bit more than um than doing it once so we've started calling this seo fitness where we tell people to like hey this is not something you can do only once this is something that you actually need to do every week and or every month and like fitness if you stop doing it for six months and then start doing it it's gonna hurt a little in the beginning and because it's actual work that you need to you need to put time into this no site is going to be is ever going to be good if you don't put time into it so i think that's the biggest challenge that to tell people like hey your website is just like your shop you need to to keep on cleaning it you need to make sure that you paint the outsides you need to well do all that maintenance now you're getting me excited yours when we talk about fitness i'm getting excited uh as a you know an epic fitness enthusiast what is a fitness programming or or even a diet look like for websites what i recommend webmasters to do with an ongoing basis to keep their site in shape so we're we're in the middle of this at the moment uh within yours on actually defining a whole lot of these things so adios we we have a we well we we used to have pre-covered a very nice office culture and i hope we'll get back to that relatively soon where people come into the office and we actually have a personal trainer uh that trains with all of our staff and uh helps them well get fit etc in many ways what you want is is to adapt personal trainings plans to every website so you want to look at a website and go like hey what does this website need we call that personal but of course even a personal trainer when he looks at you he just grabs from experience and grabs from like the 20 possibilities that he has in his head on how to combine things and that's what we're building as well so we're building workflows in how to help people work out these things i think some of the most important stuff that we can teach people to…" }, { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/joost-de-valk-on-the-impact-of-ai-on-search-engine-optimization-trusted-web-podcast-s3e3/#breadcrumb", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://joost.blog/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Videos", "item": "https://joost.blog/videos/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Joost de Valk on the impact of AI on Search Engine Optimization | Trusted Web Podcast S3E3", "item": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/joost-de-valk-on-the-impact-of-ai-on-search-engine-optimization-trusted-web-podcast-s3e3/" } } ] }, { "@type": "WebPage", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/joost-de-valk-on-the-impact-of-ai-on-search-engine-optimization-trusted-web-podcast-s3e3/", "url": "https://joost.blog/videos/joost-de-valk-on-the-impact-of-ai-on-search-engine-optimization-trusted-web-podcast-s3e3/", "name": "Joost de Valk on the impact of AI on Search 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"https://joost.blog/videos/joost-de-valk-on-the-impact-of-ai-on-search-engine-optimization-trusted-web-podcast-s3e3/" }, "thumbnailUrl": "https://img.youtube.com/vi/vzG7xI4FVrg/maxresdefault.jpg", "embedUrl": "https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/vzG7xI4FVrg", "uploadDate": "2023-05-12T00:00:00.000Z", "duration": "PT46M53S", "inLanguage": "en-US", "transcript": "[Music] foreign I'm joined by a friend a Visionary and a legend in the realm of content and search engine optimization it's yoast the fog about a decade and a half ago yo started a little tool to optimize websites for search engines together with his lovely wife Marika and our incredible team they skilled it to over 13 million users made it a commercially successful business while giving back so much to the open source ecosystems that they're part of since we last spoke here America sold the yoast company to newfold digital and today Marika and Yos are Angel Investors full disclosure since 2020 their investors in wordproof too while running their beautiful family of four Jose and I share a deep passion for building a better web and as always I'm very much looking forward to this conversation Yos thank you so much for coming to The Trusted web podcast yeah well as always I'm very happy to talk to you of course and these topics are very close to my heart so thank you for having me and yeah looking forward to the conversation you've done over the last decades you've done countless Keynotes podcast media interviews mainly on the topic of search engine optimization one-on-one we had many conversations on AI as well so yeah the ID was born to do a podcast on AI and how the two topics impacts each other well I I I will say that it's also become a bit more prevalent in the last few months I mean the recent things that have happened in AI uh have a deep impact on search of course and uh yeah that that would be my opening question then what is the state of search today what is the state of AI today will the question uh following up and how will those two worlds impact each other so of course we've seen openai release chat GPT and that caused a whole lot of Buzz um everywhere but also inside Google I've had friends at Google that I was talking to tell me like yeah we were actually surprised by that it was sooner than we expected we weren't ready Etc so um Google got caught by surprise which is a new thing and then being quite quickly quickly um actually added Bing chat so they added chat GPT into Bing and I think that that's actually the most awesome way of using Jet gbt right now because it uses the newest models and it actually gives references to the open web uh when in in its responses Chad TPT doesn't source it's content so it has a lot of content of course that it bases its its answers on but it never tells you where it gets those answers from and and Bing chat actually does do that which I think is awesome and it's also showing us a new type of interface it's a new way of searching which is way more chat based which in a way is actually for the first time really the type of digital assistant that these search engines have been claiming to have for for years now for now finally they can they can answer a question and then you can follow up and it's actually a real conversation and it uses the context of your previous questions to answer the follow-up questions so it really becomes a truly a conversation and I think with that it is a truly interesting new approach to search and we'll have a very deep impact on search and um Microsoft wished to do conversational uh to do conversation science they introduce clippy in the words don't you think yeah yeah it's in many ways I think Bing chat is clippy on steroids um but it is also um it's so powerful it also still has its risks right and I I think we'll touch on those a bit today um because not everything that it outputs is true which is always something that these search engines have have prided themselves on that they were giving you the best answers on the web and suddenly some of the answers that it gives are not true they're in fact completely hallucinated as we call them and I think that that is one of the things that we need to teach everyone about Ai and about especially these large language models that were that we're now really making like one thing together with AI they're really just a part of a of the larger field of AI but what everyone's seeing now is is basically large language models at work and it's good to understand what these things do um they really predict what would be the logical thing to say as an answer to the question that you're giving but it doesn't necessarily have to be truthful so they really are generating the the almost perfect socially access acceptable response to your type of question so they're the the best bar buddies you'll ever have but that doesn't mean just like in the pub that the answer has to be true and I think that's a risk is that it is trust not part of the design of the models is that no so it is as simple as it's really when it's generating text it's really generating text it's not um bringing up truths from somewhere and generating a text around that so it will generate facts that are not facts but it will tell them to you with a style and a Vigor as though it's fully true um but it's not it wasn't intended when it was initially built to be a thing that that generated truths and and that's where where the trust becomes an issue and we and I think we'll have to figure out as Society but also these search engines themselves how they can fix that and whether we are okay with having search engines answer like that I honestly myself think that we should be regulating that a whole lot more than we are and it well that we we have a right to know what they trained those large language models on um and what we can expect those large language models to to give in in return as answers as a result of that because a large language model outputs what it has been trained on so if you put garbage into it you get garbage out of it and a lot of what it's been trained on is the web at large and honestly the webinar probably is quite garbage so um so the output of of these models is by no means inclusive is by no means um well true and I think that that is something that we have to well start uh start compromising and and start figuring and figuring out like what can we do with these things and what can we not do yeah so that about the state of AI um state of search a bit um and then is the fastest adopted technology in history 100 million users in less than what was it two months um the day before we started using chat gbt as Society or using is not the right WordPress started playing with um what was the state of search the day before we started playing with chechi PT so in many ways search has not changed all that much in the last decade um search engines have been focusing on like who or which results can we surface what what is good content what uh who do we trust Google is called this eat and they've recently added another E so it's experience um expertise Authority and trust and um these four are the things that they train their their quality raters on who they use to train their own machine learning models so they train their their quality raters to to look for signs of expertise and Authority Etc that was already important before AI suddenly became so incredibly prevalent I think it'll be even more important uh after that because suddenly we will get a deluge of content creating content that has some is suddenly super simple and I'm not saying that people should generate their content with these models because I don't think that that's necessarily a good idea yet um because of the hallucination problems but people will do that and there will be a lot of bad content on the web suddenly and I think that's one of the things that Google is really worried about as well is not just like how do we compete with Bing and make sure that we have the same interface and the same functionality but also how do we keep ranking stuff on the web when it's all suddenly so bad and there's suddenly so much more of it and also how do we train our models on content that is truly unique and that is not generated by a model itself because then you get like yeah you're basically regurgitating garbage 500 server error in finite Loop yeah yeah it is it really becomes a problematic thing so um I think the status search was very much stable for quite a while and this will actually upset it quite a bit more than uh than it has been in in the in the last few well decades I'd almost say because it really is a step change in how quickly people are able to make content and thus create a lot of it and that means that they have to adjust their models they might also have to adjust like can they store everything isn't that too much anymore at some point can they crawl everything which is a topic that's close to my heart as well because the way that they crawl the web is totally un unsustainable in in a way um and then there's the costume factor to it because running a large language model is a costly business it means continuously training these large language models and that training is super intensive it's intensive enough that in a recent Washington Post interview I I'll drop you a link for the show notes um the uh the CEO of Google was talking about the cost impact of um calculating these models this is a company that did 192 billion dollars in Revenue last year that is seriously thinking about the cost impact of running these models and I I think that has to give you pause like if they're thinking about that what what is that why is that so huge and turns out that by some estimates it's about 10 times more expensive to run in the search on AI than it is on their traditional methods so suddenly there are costs 10x and that's a problem and it's more Moore's Law um is it a will that 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"https://joost.blog/videos/joost-de-valk-on-the-power-of-raising-funds-in-bootstrapping-ecosystems/#video", "name": "Joost de Valk on the Power of Raising Funds In Bootstrapping Ecosystems", "description": "", "isPartOf": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/joost-de-valk-on-the-power-of-raising-funds-in-bootstrapping-ecosystems/" }, "thumbnailUrl": "https://img.youtube.com/vi/keCOWL6QP1k/maxresdefault.jpg", "embedUrl": "https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/keCOWL6QP1k", "uploadDate": "2024-04-16T00:00:00.000Z", "duration": "PT36M43S", "inLanguage": "en-US", "transcript": "we don't really care about money we care about impact today's guest G Deval bootstrapped his business and grew it to a 12 million websites that use their Flagship product yast SEO he didn't take investment at yast and I will not tell you that everyone should take an investment yast and his wife mik exited the company which set them on a new exciting path into the world of investing with their company Amelia Capital if you are just in it to make a certain amount of money that's fine but then probably don't take investment from anyone in this episode we're going to jump into how much you could expect to raise from an early funding round 200,000 in Revenue a year is probably not enough to take like meaningful investment why you might want to raise capital from investors like Y what I think is actually the most important thing is that you I'm not saying we're doing this perfectly all the time yast welcome to the show thank you for having me um okay so Yost SEO you grew it to 140 people a 12 million website were using the regular Yos plugin which is incredible you've exited and now you are an investor in software products why um I guess just genuinely like why why do that I uh I I think a lot of people who listen to the show are software craters and there is no end to that Journey for I think a lot of these people so why end that journey and start a new one well first of all I didn't end it I'm releasing new product uh and I don't think I'll ever really stop creating stuff but I've fallen into the Trap of thinking I know better and and I can I can and ma can help uh other companies grow faster better more while doing meaningful stuff so we don't just invest in products we only want to invest in things that we think actually does something more for the world than just make money and um and we think we can help those uh those companies we we've obviously done fairly well with yast um for a while we thought that that was an accident and as you help more companies you realize no it's not an accident there's actually quite a few things that we've done right that we can help other people replicate there's also things that we did wrong that we can help other people prevent prevent themselves from doing that's where I'm an expert I'm an I've done the only way to learn out I I think other people learn in other ways I definitely only learn through definitely made Aon mistakes Y and and I think we can help people with with that experience but we but we can also show them like hey we did this and that worked you can make these changes and that'll really work and um yeah I think that's very valuable and then on top of that we well we made a good amount of money when we sold y uh and and we want to bring some of that back into the WordPress ecosystem because that's how I we think it's supposed to work uh you have to reinvest back into what what made you rich yes I love that I and I uh I I remember seeing your uh word Camp Europe talk in um yeah that was en lighten yeah yeah but so I saw a talk from you 10 years ago and that lines up with what you're saying now about reinvesting hey I'm consistent you yeah I I I truly truly believe in open source and I also truly believe that we need to build business models around open source to make this ecosystem work I like that let me actually ask when I think of investor I think of people who only care about returns is investor the right word well the thing is I want those companies to make money because I because if you you've seen that talk on the victory of the commons and if you haven't I urge you to go and watch it because I still think it's very relevant companies need to make money H if companies make make money they can do more of what they do and if they have a purpose to to exist other than making money they can do more of that other thing now so we invest money and time slash opinions slel um and for most of our invest portfolio companies that is one two hours a week it's not like uh like we're investing full days but it'll be in Sprints right so sometimes we'll we'll look at one thing for four hours and then we won't look at you for for a couple of weeks but I think every investor helps their portfolio companies especially when you invest like we do pretty early stage we're usually the first investor um so you need to help people build a company and the first time you're building a company that's scary stuff you're you're setting up things you're maybe hiring some people you're you're uh incorporating or not or well you're making all these decisions and that that that is what we help with and and then we help you well make the product better it's not philanthropy we we we intend to do that truly with well with the idea of making money and then reinvesting that money into other things again and of course that goes wrong like nine times out of 10 yes I I do agree with that uh early on you said it's about once you make money then you can kind of do anything feels like you're teaching someone how to fish like they now know how to fish they're they're making enough money to pay for their costs and now they can really add yeah and I think I'm also not necessarily the biggest fan of the system of doing a round and then raising another round and because that only works when you're building stuff for like the really really big market and not everyone is and that's fine um and I think we have the the added benefit of basically being well we only invest our own Capital so we don't have other investors investing into our funds that have to get our money back so we don't really care if we get our money back in two years or in 10 years I yeah I really don't care yeah that giv a lot of flexibility I'm sure as an investor yeah what is the what is the argument for for working for having an investor for for taking raising Capital what is what is that argument because I I don't think we hear it enough in the WordPress world so we didn't take investment at yast and I will not tell you that everyone should take an investment that being said in hindsight would I have taken investment at Yos I I would we probably at some point would have but it really depends on who's investing and what they can do to help you the thing is that a lot of the processes that you're going to run into as your company grows bigger are entirely new to you and and you're basically figuring it out all on the Fly you either hire people to help you do that or you get an investor on board that helps you do that there's multiple ways around that and and I I'm not saying that one is better than the other but sometimes it's to one is too expensive and you can only do the other um and I think that investors can also help you with things that you might not even realize that you need one of the things we had and we we'd been thinking about selling yos for a while so we we had run a uh a sales process before covid and it broke because of covid and because of that we learned when we were selling Yos the second time to run a proper process with a banker now that is not something that a startup will do on their own easily we got lucky I had some friends in the right places and I found a Dutch Banker who was incredible helped us through the process um and we were big enough to actually find a banker that wanted to help us and could do that because a lot of those Bankers will only take deals above like 10 million or 100 million or there freshh hold stay working um that sort of thing becomes easier when you have an investor and it's also I think an investor also makes it easier for you to determine whether you want to get out of your business at some point or not I do think that when you take investment you have to really really think about do I want to get out of this business at some point and if you don't which is fine pick an investor that's fine with that too I mean we'd be very happy to take like a 10% stake in the company and then take 10% of returns from the company every year for decades if if that company's running well so I'm just taking some notes here but is the idea um is the idea you can structure the deal differently if you do want to get let's say you want to get exit in five or 10 years do you structure the deal differently or or why do you have to think about that early on um well you have to think about that because if you don't you bring on you might bring investors on board that need to get rid of their money need to get their money back after a certain point in time so either you need to buy them out or something else needs to happen so to they'll look for what they call a liquidity event um and I mean I if you're not ready to think about that yet that's fine but then you have to make sure that you keep investors that you get investors that they're fine with you keeping your options open yeah there has to be a liquidity event which is either you know like all the way at the end of the progress is like going public on the stock market that's the ultimate liquidity event but there's also other ways there's other other St think most of the time it's selling your company to some someone bigger correct and I hope to invest in something that goes public at some point but it also looks like a lot of work yeah yeah that's it's a lot of work yeah yeah I I can't imagine I can't imagine so so let me ask you this so you talked about you didn't rate you didn't take Capital At yast what if you did take Capital what do you think would have changed would you have gotten bigger like instead of going up to 140 people you would have gotten up to 200 people would you would you have gotten to the same size but faster like what what would have been the differences if you did take capital I don't know whether we have hired that more people that many more people I think we actually probably hired a bit too many at some point um which is something that maybe an investor could have prevented us from doing um I think we would have gotten bigger…" }, { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/joost-de-valk-technical-seo-to-grow-your-wordpress-business/#breadcrumb", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://joost.blog/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Videos", "item": "https://joost.blog/videos/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Joost de 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"2023-11-16T00:00:00.000Z", "duration": "PT1M12S", "inLanguage": "en-US", "transcript": "[Music] this is horrible glasses upon glasses is not really a workable thing disclose your distressing defeat we had always fixed something in WordPress called attachment URLs so when you upload a file in WordPress it creates an attachment URL for it by default that's something that we disabled in WordPress and then in a release we did we undisabled it and suddenly all those attachment URLs were being indexed by search engines again so that was actually very bad for their SEO I still to this day don't know exactly what we did wrong I know we fixed it but I don't know where it went wrong when when we found out we had to do a lot of work to build a plugin that would actually Purge those URLs from the site and from Google's index you're not going to like what I'm saying build automated testing for everything you build so that every feature you build is automated automatically checked every single 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America 2025. My name is Paul Nashawati and I'm covering the application development space and all things open source. I'm joined today by Kareem and Yoast. How you doing guys? Good. Good to see you. Why don't you guys introduce yourself to the audience? Uh I'm Yoast. I a couple of years ago, well more than a decade ago, founded a company called Yoast, which I sold in 2021, which was focused on the WordPress space. So, an SEO plug-in um and I've been an investor in that WordPress space ever since. Uh doing all sorts of things. It's used very very uh frequently. It's very awesome. It has been used by quite a lot of websites. Yes, it has. Yes, it has. Kareem and I'm Kareem Marooi um CEO of CRUD Favorite. I've spent 30 years installing and managing teams that install content management systems in the enterprise and the last 15 years I've been doing it with open source. Nice. Nice. Well, this is uh the best place to be at, right? Open source summit, right? It's it's uh open source. It's you can see the the the the excitement here is just amazing, right? But like let's start jump right into this because we we we're talking about different projects and different initiatives here. the keynotes were, you know, exploding with a lot of just announcements and things that are happening, you know, and so when we're looking at uh the fair uh project manager, right? This is a what let's start there and talk about like what was the impetus to kind of drive this project. So the fair package manager is is a package manager for WordPress. It's meant as a replacement for WordPress.org work um for the reason that we've had a couple of incidents over the last couple of years and more recently the end of last year where it was made very clear that we had a supply chain security problem in the in the WordPress space and unfortunately that problem came from within uh and we we were looking at how do we solve for that so we had the a big host being cut off from WordPress org access basically disallowing all of their clients to get plugins and themes and updates to WordPress itself at that point. And then later on we had a a plugin so piece of open source software being taken over and replaced by something else um on WordPress.org and we were looking at like how do we fix that without breaking up the entire community because we we didn't want to do that. We wanted to keep the WordPress community the way it is, right? but just change how it's distributed. Um, and that's how we came up with the fair package manager. Fair stands for federated and independent repositories. So, the idea is that a lot of hosts when this happened started putting up their own mirrors of WordPress.org, but you still had this central problem, this central point of well a a point of failure in many ways. Um, and what we're doing with fair is we're making all those mirrors that actually become repositories at that point, making them federate with each other so that if one of the lines is cut, we just route around it and and we well work just like the internet itself, right? Which has some added benefits uh because we can now also host plugins and themes outside of WordPress.org and still make them findable within the WordPress admin. So you can make premium plugins and and themes findable in the admin and have an entire ecosystem around that which we hope will foster innovation in the in the space a bit more and allow people to build profitable products. Sure makes sense on top of WordPress. What a lot of people don't realize is that WordPress powers more than 40% of the web today. Right. Right. I realize that it's it's a giant single point of failure. Yeah. And it's time for an evolution of how we distribute and how we update and how we create an ecosystem of products around the biggest most successful content management system that's ever happened. Right. Well, I mean dependencies and security concerns is incredibly important especially when you're talking about 40% of the the population using or you know in the in the in the ecosystem. The the ecosystem is quite large, right? Yeah. And when we start looking at, you know, the you touched on a little bit here about the the federated and independent repositories and what this means. Can we talk like just double click a little bit down? Kim, I'm going to start with you. Like when we look at the federated work models and how this is all coming together, what benefit does that offer to developers, hosts, and and end users? Like when you think about it, right? So in my day job, I spend all my time with Fortune50, Fortune 500 companies, right? And the cost of ownership of open source is already really the reason to come to open source as the beginning of it, right? But then to in today's content management system, even something as simple as WordPress, we're using literally um packages and containers to even do updates because it hasn't been reliable and it hasn't been something that you could actually just say this is going to be 100% the way we do it even behind the corporate firewall. So with a fair package manager, large organizations are actually going to be able to put up their own nodes, okay, in front of the firewall, they could share with the entire world. If you're an open organization that wants to help or behind the firewall, if you have only a subset of things that you want to make available to your organization, you can actually do that. but also we're going to be able to actually integrate more of the commercial plugins and modules that have helped this open- source ecosystem grow and be so successful over the last 22 years. I mean that makes a lot of sense though right because it is an open community right you have all these different plugins you want it to grow and you want innovation to occur right so yos when we talk about this ecosystem is it is it being wellreceived by the e by the ecosystem or is it I I think the community was very welcoming to it yeah no the response has been very overwhelmingly positive um with lots of people reaching out and uh and well I mean there's been this this system where basically one entity has been in control of the ecosystem for a very long time and a lot of people wanted that to change and I think this is a good step towards us actually setting up proper governance and they and a system where we can all benefit a bit more from our each other's knowledge and and work together and also decide together where this goes instead of one person or company deciding hey we're going that way. Um so it's been very well received. People are are very happy. We we've been testing with quite a few uh of the distribution hosts uh when we started working on this and I expected for a lot of them to roll this out over time. I' I'd like to add also think of it this way as as an open-source content management system. We're competing with SAS and closed source systems that are spending tens of millions of dollars on ease of use and onboarding, right? and the ecosystem all the modules and plugins around WordPress for the last 22 years it's been an ongoing fight to try and make it easier and easier for the end users. Sure. So with fair we're able to actually have an evolution of how this happens now. Well and you also meet in the development community but the the clients where they are in their own journey right you don't have to say like oh this is this is a prepackaged proprietary way of doing it do it our way or no way. It's like you can now you can build it the way the client wants it to be built and they can either be very mature or just starting out. So it's kind of a like I like that kind of evolution. The one thing that that I was very much interested in um when we when I was reading through the press release was the GDPR impacts the the the you know the data. Yeah. Right. And also the telemetry pieces right the data. So like so these so Karine let's start with you what what are your thoughts there on that? So GDPR has already been uh a big concern of how we're going to address that and really with the upcoming CRA and eventually what's going to come to the United States as its own version of that. Um, if we don't do something about that, WordPress is going to be left behind because as it stands today, the agency installing it, the the contractors installing it, the hosts themselves would all be um liable, right, for the software, right? So, it we need to have an evolution of how this works so that way we can comply. Well, yeah. Well, reporting has to occur by September 2026, I believe, and then by everything needs to be complied by December of 2027 for CRA, right? But it's it's interesting when I have these conversations about in development world, uh, organizations are like, well, that doesn't apply to us. We don't really do a lot in Europe. But it's like, no, but you do worldwide like we're no longer anymore of like which which space you're working. The compliance is the compliance and regulations are the regulations. So you're going to box out just customers if you don't have the applications working in a certain way. Yeah. And it's quite being European, it's quite a large market. Of course it is. And uh and and as Kareem said, a lot of this is coming to the US and other places in the world in in maybe a slightly adapted form, but but the the basic underlying ideas of what this legislation does, especially if you look at GDPR, you've you've seen that already happen with the CCPA. And this is going to happen to to the um to these other things as well. we we will have these security rules because honestly we need them right because a lot of the uh WordPress sites are also well we WordPress has a a pretty bad name in some ways in terms of security not because WordPress itself is insecure but because how it's being dealt with is sometimes very insecure and getting better practices in ter in that and getting more uh ways of of figuring out like…" }, { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/keynote-rebuilding-trust-a-fair-path-forward-for-wordpress-and-open-source-karim-marucchi-joost-de-valk/#breadcrumb", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://joost.blog/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Videos", "item": "https://joost.blog/videos/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Keynote: Rebuilding Trust: A FAIR Path Forward for WordPress and Open Source | Karim Marucchi & Joost de Valk", "item": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/keynote-rebuilding-trust-a-fair-path-forward-for-wordpress-and-open-source-karim-marucchi-joost-de-valk/" } } ] }, { "@type": "WebPage", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/keynote-rebuilding-trust-a-fair-path-forward-for-wordpress-and-open-source-karim-marucchi-joost-de-valk/", "url": "https://joost.blog/videos/keynote-rebuilding-trust-a-fair-path-forward-for-wordpress-and-open-source-karim-marucchi-joost-de-valk/", "name": "Keynote: Rebuilding Trust: A FAIR Path Forward for WordPress and Open Source | Karim Marucchi & Joost de Valk", "isPartOf": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/#/schema.org/WebSite" }, "potentialAction": [ { "@type": "ReadAction", "target": [ "https://joost.blog/videos/keynote-rebuilding-trust-a-fair-path-forward-for-wordpress-and-open-source-karim-marucchi-joost-de-valk/" ] } ], "breadcrumb": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/keynote-rebuilding-trust-a-fair-path-forward-for-wordpress-and-open-source-karim-marucchi-joost-de-valk/#breadcrumb" }, "inLanguage": "en-US", "datePublished": "2025-07-02T00:00:00.000Z", "copyrightHolder": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/about-me/#/schema.org/Person" }, "copyrightYear": 2025 }, { "@type": "VideoObject", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/keynote-rebuilding-trust-a-fair-path-forward-for-wordpress-and-open-source-karim-marucchi-joost-de-valk/#video", "name": "Keynote: Rebuilding Trust: A FAIR Path Forward for WordPress and Open Source | Karim Marucchi & Joost de Valk", "description": "", "isPartOf": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/keynote-rebuilding-trust-a-fair-path-forward-for-wordpress-and-open-source-karim-marucchi-joost-de-valk/" }, "thumbnailUrl": "https://img.youtube.com/vi/mIi2Nib1yh4/maxresdefault.jpg", "embedUrl": "https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/mIi2Nib1yh4", "uploadDate": "2025-07-02T00:00:00.000Z", "duration": "PT11M29S", "inLanguage": "en-US", "transcript": "First of all, thank you for having us. Uh we're delighted to be here and delighted to be able to present to you all what we what we've been working on for quite a while now. Jim already mentioned WordPress is huge and WordPress has been growing for pretty much 20 out of the last 22 years. The last few years it has stabilized a bit but that is in part because it's reached a market share that is almost unfathomable for this kind of tool. We 40% of the web is powered by WordPress and competitors are like 10 times smaller or much smaller than that. So this ecosystem is tremendously important for the web and for everything that builds upon it. All those AIs are trained on content that was once published on a WordPress blog somewhere. There's a lot of stats here. I'm not going to go over all of them, but you see that this is a huge ecosystem and it's an ecosystem that unfortunately is a bit at risk at times. So what a lot of people don't realize is that the package that you install isn't the entire system. There's a giant ecosystem underneath it that supports from extending what WordPress can do to updating it to making it international. There is so much to be done around how that the there's so much that is around the project that helps that e that WordPress site work well and every single site depends on this infrastructure. So the problem is this infrastructure now is also 22 years old. This infrastructure has been working well. It served us to get where we are today. And it's been worked on in a way that's kept it stable up until the size that we have it now. And then for some of you, you might have heard of how last fall there was a little bit of drama. What ended up happening is WordPress.org decided to uh cut off a major host. In cutting off that major host, all of those end users ended up not having a way to update their websites. They couldn't get certain plugins. they couldn't get certain updates and infrastructure systems going. So the ecosystem all of a sudden was reminded of the one weakness that we have with this infrastructure and the trust needed to be verified. So then it got worse. All of a sudden WordPress.org or decided to s supplant one plugin, one module for another. What what would happen if it wasn't announced? The enterprise companies that we work with said, \"This is a supply chain security issue. There's a problem here. What happens if it's not announced? What happens if there's no check and balance in this system?\" So what we needed to do is we needed to understand how can we make sure that we can ensure that there is not one single entity making unilateral decisions on an open- source project that is this important and this global. So there have been other projects, other content management systems that have shrunk, that have died completely, that have gone commercial because they haven't been able to solve some of these problems. And WordPress honestly has an ecosystem, a community that depends on it to go forward and be tr a truly open- source CMS. So the distribution um ended up and the distribution hosts ended up saying all right we're going to solve this by doing mirrors. Let's all just put up our own mirrors. But there was a problem with that. Over time you're going to get architectural drift. Over time you're going to end up having inequities between one host and the other. And all of these companies are going to go in different directions. So there were different groups in the ecosystem at the end of the last year who were quietly trying to figure out how could they help, how could they do this, but really it was in the hand of the hosts to say we are going to try and mitigate for what's going to happen with WordPress.org. Well, it still creates a single point of failure because these were just mayors. So there were lots of other conversations to have around how do we ensure that this is a strong and independent system. So slowly these groups of groups started talking to each other and coming together and we're very proud to say that since December things started coming together and we created something together called fair federated and independent repositories. This is a lot of words that don't have to mean the same thing to everyone, but for us it means that we allow all these mirrors to actually become repositories and to talk to each other. And just like the internet, if someone decides to cut one of those lines, we will route around it. This allows for a lot more as well. Historically, in the admin of WordPress, only plugins that were available on WordPress.org were findable in the admin and WordPress.org only allowed free plugins. With fair, we can actually allow premium plugins and plugins that don't want to be hosted on WordPress.org for whatever reason to be found in the admin of all the sites connected to the fair network. This allows for a lot more commercial ecosystem to evolve around all of this which brings innovation that we really desperately need. The fair package manager is in principle a protocol. It's a protocol for how these repositories talk to each other. It's also an actual implementation, a client and a server of that protocol. and one node, a central node that everyone can use if they want to if you if hosts don't have their own node. It's actively being developed by this group of groups that Kareem talked about which is now over 200 people with a core group of 50 people working on this for free months at a time and it's the only way we think and actually one of the Linux Foundation members uh Oliver Sil the CEO of patch said this is probably the only way in which WordPress is going to be compatible with the European in CRA that Jim already mentioned before because there is so much to do on the WordPress.org side to make WordPress compatible with the CRA and we've actually also taken a lot of steps to make WordPress much more compatible with GDPR and the California Privacy Act. We're currently actively testing with a large group of hosts and we're actually very fortunate to say that a lot of them are giving us very good feedback. We're not done yet, which is to be expected because well, we started only a a fair bit ago, but this group is really stepping up and doing a lot of amazing work. When we announced just two weeks ago in Basil, um the reaction have been has been overwhelming. I think the clear thing that we've heard back is that this is what the WordPress community at large wanted in many ways. While they may not all get all the technology, what they were looking for was a path forward, a path away from the drama that we had been recently having and a path forward into an age where we can actually say, \"Hey, we're going to make WordPress ready for the next 20 years.\" In doing all that building, we needed something more. We knew that we didn't just need code. We needed to actually also fix the thing that was the problem, which is that one person or company should never be able to do this again to our software project. And that's why we came to the Linux Foundation. Honestly, the WordPress ecosystem has historically been very isolated within the open source ecosystem. We have our own word camps and not a whole lot of y'all end up there or vice versa. There's a couple of exceptions which we're very thankful for. some sitting here up front um because they helped us get in touch and helped us make this possible because honestly we've been figuring out a whole lot of stuff within the WordPress ecosystem ourselves that we should have just been learning from the rest of the wider open source world. The Linux Foundation was a logical step for us to go to and say, \"Okay, we need help in how we set this up with proper governance and with proper funding.\" Well, we've done that. We're here today. We're very thankful that we get to say that. We're also very thankful for all those contributors who are putting in a lot of hard work. There's a lot of names that I'm not going to name, but there are a couple of projects like Aspire Press that started before us that we really done a lot of great work together with. And today, we are announcing the establishment of a foundation to secure the future of a truly open-source CMS for the open web. Today, we're asking all of you, companies, individuals, contributors, please come help us because the future of a truly open-source CMS rests in the hands of the open source community. We need to futureproof this system to be able to truly be independent and have checks and balances for the next generation of an open web. This is the only true way that we can work as a community to make sure that the next generations have access to nonprivatized websites. With that, we thank you and we hope to see you there. Thanks, guys." }, { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/marieke-van-de-rakt-and-joost-de-valk-beyond-seo-copywriting-for-professionals/#breadcrumb", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://joost.blog/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Videos", "item": "https://joost.blog/videos/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Marieke van de Rakt & Joost de Valk: Beyond SEO – Copywriting for professionals", "item": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/marieke-van-de-rakt-and-joost-de-valk-beyond-seo-copywriting-for-professionals/" } } ] }, { "@type": "WebPage", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/marieke-van-de-rakt-and-joost-de-valk-beyond-seo-copywriting-for-professionals/", "url": "https://joost.blog/videos/marieke-van-de-rakt-and-joost-de-valk-beyond-seo-copywriting-for-professionals/", "name": "Marieke van de Rakt & Joost de Valk: Beyond SEO – Copywriting for professionals", "isPartOf": { 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"https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/TNQmGqrokX4", "uploadDate": "2023-05-23T00:00:00.000Z", "duration": "PT49M23S", "inLanguage": "en-US", "transcript": "[Music] thank you this is WP product talk the place where every week we talk about the business and workings of owning running managing succeeding and even failing in the space of WordPress products and product ownership I'm Katie Keith CEO of planting plugins miss my line and I'm Matt Cromwell co-founder of give WP and now senior director of customer experience at Stellar WP and today's topic is what makes for a great WordPress product brand and why you might want to Rebrand now I've personally been looking forward to this one uh it's honestly something that I don't feel like it's very much conversation in the WordPress product space and yet it's really fundamental and really important so looking forward to this and to introduce Our Guest today we have a special appearance from Michelle frechette I am Michelle frechette from podcasts like WP Coffee Talk under represented in Tech WP motivate and the new podcast series WP constellations I'm introducing today's WP product talk guest Jose Volk Yost is an internet entrepreneur hailing from the Netherlands he's the founder of yoast the company which was sold to newfold digital in July 2021. he's an extensive background in digital marketing and WordPress yoast is married to Marika who previously held the physician of CEO at yoast until the company's acquisition the couple has four children together through their company Amelia Capital Yost and Marika invest in businesses that operate at least partially within the digital realm they also manage their own projects such as marika's Empower women's initiative it is my pleasure to get to know both yoast and Marika through the WordPress community and I've enjoyed following their initiatives that help make the community more accessible to underrepresented people I'm excited to see what will come as Amelia Capital grows and wish them amazing success and now here's Yost enjoy the show hey welcome welcome thank you that was a nice intro we try we try to make people blush when they come on here yeah I'm all blushing now I'll have to thank Michelle for that so Michelle thank you if you're watching absolutely cool well here we are and like Katie said talking about branding I'm excited um and uh how we always kick this off is uh we want to encourage everyone who's watching to uh use the chat if you're here on YouTube um use the chat and give us your questions or your comments or your feedback or throw tomatoes at yoast or whatever you like um uh we can handle it if you're on Twitter use the hashtag WP product talk and we'll be paying attention um but uh the first things first is uh why this subject is so important um yoast this was actually your recommendation as a subject and uh so you're you're on the you're on the on the platform here why is this so important why is this such a big deal so in the end I think everyone when building a product once wants people to buy that product and a large part of that decision is do people trust you do people know you do they so all of these things are important and a lot of that is is always considered marketing but a very important portion of that is branding and and it's very important that people understand who you are but also have a feeling when they see your name they have to have that positive connotation to your name they have to trust you to actually fix their problem for you so um branding is indeed not talked about enough in the WordPress world I think one of the reasons yoast got as big as it was was because we did our branding very well and I would suggest that everybody who wants to build a product brand like that do the same and and and things about their brand and builds it and that's more than just creating a logo yeah absolutely for sure I mean I definitely have heard folks there's I've heard some mixed reviews on the aesthetic of yoast honestly some folks don't love it but I think every single person finds it distinctive like you can't not remember it that's the thing I think that's really interesting I I think that's more important than than necessarily having everyone love the imagery or whatever it is you're using um I I I think that the well it's one of the things that we did when we created yoast is it literally the second person we hired was a web designer or and a designer in general and the third person we hire was an illustrator and uh before we even hired any coders so having that that design and standing out from the crowd which is what you're doing literally has always been very important yeah absolutely I think it's really clever with the yoast brand how you've got kind of the right balance between a personal brand and also something that can stand away from you which is obviously important as you step away more um like you've got entirely entirely now I'm not involved anymore at all which is weird but it's but it's true it must be and with your name you'll always be branding wise symbolically and even right down to the little ghost Legos that people still have in their children's toy boxes and things but it is a distinct brand that can continue without which is really clever and it is we had we actually had a project at some point taking yoast out of yoast um and and our project was very much like because in the very beginning and and the WordPress uh old people will remember this like Katie is far too young for this to remember this I think but I I was in the header of every page like literally my avatar was in the editor of every page on that site and at some point there were like 25 people working at Yellowstone we still had that and I I talked to a friend at a conference and he was like dude you need to get away from that I'm like yeah you're probably right and and then we did so we we had the taking yoast out of yoast project and now it happens sometimes that I'm introduced at conferences as this is Juiced from yoast yeah yeah and I'm like yeah okay that worked nice Katie what about you um so yeah definitely an important topic for all those reasons it also makes you stand out from the competition and can help to justify a premium price tag so if you just have kind of a really neutral brand that isn't very memorable people will expect to pay kind of middlely prices if you've got a really distinct professional brand then I think you can charge more for what is otherwise the same product because it's all about perception and as yo said a minute ago it's not just about visuals because it cuts across all of your customer contact points right down to things like the tone of voice that your support team use when they respond to technical support tickets but um not enough WordPress companies put that emphasis into their brand so we we should be talking about it as the WordPress product Talk podcast and whether it's worth putting that investment in to get a more distinctive brand mm-hmm absolutely yeah those are good considerations for sure I mean I think in some ways we should probably kind of distinguish for some folks that a brand is a kind of like an umbrella term for a lot of different things like you have your brand name you have your brand logo you have your brand icon um you kind of have often like a brand um voice um or tone or identity um that you want to represent in different ways uh we we could talk about all those things I'm not trying to limit the conversation but uh in many ways I think like starting with just the name itself like starting with yoast or starting with barn two we'll get into our our story talk a little bit later about these things but like those that that name by itself regardless of the icon or the logo I think is is uh unique and different um and can be the premium thing all by itself depending on on what that what that name is especially if you combine it with like a really slick domain if you're able to get away with like a really like a six letter domain in many ways you know nobody gets four letters anymore but um you know things like that can really be a big deal sometimes they're surprisingly cheap I mean yoast.com I bought only well that's not true it's like 18 years ago that I bought that I think but it it was only two and a half thousand dollars at that point nice all right what about yoast.nl do you have that one too we have yeah we have a lot of the different versions yet so um the funny thing is there's more people named Jost that I used the the same way of spelling it so it took some time to to com to get them all and also to use the power of a registered trademark and which you should do by the way if you're if you have a product and you have a name that you can register register that trademark yeah um to to actually get all the domain names and all the the Twitter handles and everything like that yeah yep really important um for me I think when it comes to branding uh the reason why this is such a big deal is it's really the very first impression of your product um you know they're gonna see the name they're gonna hear it uh from a friend um they're gonna see it online in the social context or an ad or something like that that's going to be the very first interaction um that they get in different ways in one way or another um and um I uh I I really think First Impressions matter a ton when it comes to um customer trust in who you are and what they want to do and whether they want to spend money with you at all um I I think Impressions first impressions are a big deal well and it's also not just First Impressions right a lot of this is people hearing about you multiple times before they buy from you uh and and getting onto your website probably a couple of times before they buy we see especially with three medium products it sometimes takes more than a year for people to go from free to premium and uh and and that is building up that brand recognition and that well that that power that they attribute to your brand over time so it's that's also why consistency in these things is very important you have to be…" }, { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/omreport-com-joost-de-valk-part-1-2/#breadcrumb", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://joost.blog/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Videos", "item": "https://joost.blog/videos/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "OMReport.com - Joost de Valk Part 1/2", "item": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/omreport-com-joost-de-valk-part-1-2/" } } ] }, { "@type": "WebPage", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/omreport-com-joost-de-valk-part-1-2/", "url": "https://joost.blog/videos/omreport-com-joost-de-valk-part-1-2/", "name": "OMReport.com - Joost de Valk Part 1/2", "isPartOf": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/#/schema.org/WebSite" }, "potentialAction": [ { "@type": "ReadAction", "target": [ "https://joost.blog/videos/omreport-com-joost-de-valk-part-1-2/" ] } ], "breadcrumb": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/omreport-com-joost-de-valk-part-1-2/#breadcrumb" }, "inLanguage": "en-US", "datePublished": "2011-10-09T00:00:00.000Z", "copyrightHolder": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/about-me/#/schema.org/Person" }, "copyrightYear": 2011 }, { "@type": "VideoObject", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/omreport-com-joost-de-valk-part-1-2/#video", "name": "OMReport.com - Joost de Valk Part 1/2", "description": "", "isPartOf": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/omreport-com-joost-de-valk-part-1-2/" }, "thumbnailUrl": "https://img.youtube.com/vi/nLJIo2zy2zw/maxresdefault.jpg", "embedUrl": "https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/nLJIo2zy2zw", "uploadDate": "2011-10-09T00:00:00.000Z", "duration": "PT8M44S", "inLanguage": "en-US", "transcript": "welcome to om report by andrei alper your interview focus podcast on topics from online marketing to internet startups so today's om report is with yoast yoast please introduce yourself uh hi yoster volk um i do wordpress and a bit of seo and combining the two okay so what was first wordpress or seo seo okay i picked wordpress because it was reasonably easy to seo but and then i started building plugins to actually make the seo for wordpress easier so but seo was their first i had a professional career in seo before i even started in wordpress okay but you're an engineer by heart i mean you studied something like computer science no i studied uh theology and international business and management studies but i've been coding ever since i was 12 and built my first website in when i was 12 in 94 so um i've always been a coder i've got i've i've studied those two studies and dropped out and and went to work as a java developer basically so yeah i'm a coder at heart but also a bit of a market here and the combination or sort of makes me into what i am i guess okay so you have like a whole range of free products you're giving away how does that make how does that work out i mean how does that pay off you just because of the honor and pride and the number of downloads you know doesn't earn money no it doesn't um it does it has generated a huge amount of visibility for me which generates a lot of leads every day leads for for seo consulting and wordpress consulting so when you do more wordpress consulting or is the open consulting or is it usually actually it's usually fourth press consulting yeah it's usually both so um although i do some other platforms as well i've done quite a bit for magento so i do uh and done the same online shops yeah so i've done the same stuff there released some free extensions done an article in magento seo and so um i tend to think i could actually replicate it for any other platform should i want to um so we were waiting for a yoast magento seo plug-in well there is one uh already uh uh a robot's matter extension for uh magento it's not as as as big as the world no my word processing is functionality-wise no my wordpress seo plugin is by far the biggest thing i've built so far uh are you aware of how many people are using it um people know i know this runs on over a million sites now but um that is because it also it's run on a very large amount of multi-site installations so it's like wordpress yeah it's just yeah so it's a couple of very same new yeah multi-site is the new name okay yeah so there's a couple of very very big ones where it started off with like the greek letter right and then it was confusing it was like the moon yeah it was it was the move first yeah and it they turned it into multi-site later on it's a little less nerdy and it's a little easier to not make mistakes regarding it yeah it's uh it's a a lot more useful way yeah and so how do people have to imagine your your everyday work you have a fancy office with lots of employees coders that do your stuff and you just attach your name onto it how it works i worked great view and a palace basically no no no i only started out on my own in october last year so i was an agency guy before that and as most of your listeners will know hcc people make [ ] all so um so i started out on my own in october been doing very well but i work from home and i like that a lot i've got two kids so i see them enough a lot number three is coming up so i'll have a lot of time for that and a lot of i do outsource a lot to all over the world depending on what needs to be done so like what kind of tests like coding tasks or brief blog posts no not my own blog posts but i do outsource content writing for other stuff yeah okay so but the coding you do yourself or you do some of the coding outsourced as well i outsource some of the coding um which countries you outsource to uh like offshore or like sure or near friends friends in netherlands no most of it it depends a bit on what it is so if it's sites or stuff for clients it's usually eastern europe um for instance for my seo plugin i recently had an english wordpress core developer do some of the stuff in there because i couldn't fix it myself so it depends a bit of what needs to be done um my experience with outsourcing too so it's pretty entrepreneurial actually yeah my yeah my experience with outsourcing to indians etc have been less good so others make other experiences that's always okay yeah so i really like working with a lot of uh the eastern european countries and uh will have some pretty good experiences there yeah okay so what would the the clients that you consult are they you know are they like publishing houses because they use wordpress or do you uh everywhere so in the last year i've worked with uh ebay sales force cinema tribune i mean to have more than one person talking to them right so yeah i mean at least uh two other companies you've named i know others who also work for them oh absolutely so how does that work i mean how do you collaborate so you don't because you usually you hear after the fact that they work there as well and that's how big companies work they just waste money and so i think this is the case or does it probably also make sense because people yeah different things fresh eyes and tough things to get new input the thing is i do other things usually so for ebay for instance most of what i do for ebay is training they're developers and seo okay so it's more training making them understand why the marketers maybe want something yeah making and making making sure that they don't [ ] up and for in the first place okay so what is the kind of thing that you make them look out for how does one have to well the funny thing is most web developers um really like developing according to web standards but they can't really um convince their bosses that they need to spend a bit more money and do it and do everything according to web standards and i can usually show them that that is actually very good seo as well so they can sell it a bit better to their bosses and then they when a marketeer comes to them and say can we do this and this they can actually implement it in a in a nice and web standards friendly way and it usually works very well for seo then i teach them the small little tricks where these things are different and show them that seo actually makes money but what happens in a lot of companies where i come in is that seos and developers are fighting because seos are the marketing department and they hate the developers and the other way around or they're even separate then they fight against other online marketers get product managers against tech guys et cetera yeah so it's a very integrative uh kind of you know task seo it's more integrative it has to do with other types of companies yeah so related to sca or anything else yeah so i try to explain that to those developers and uh because i'm i come from a development background and have some well i've got some things to my name that that show me show them that i'm actually a good developer okay uh so they trust you they trust me you can take them on the journey yeah and that helps a lot so yeah that's what i do i do that quite often if you if you're focused on the tech side of seo it so it must have been that your focus is mostly on page is that yeah it is yeah absolutely yeah so you could always stay perfectly whitehead if you're not cloaking around it was also good for the image and good for the relationships i i tend to think i'm very right-handed yes yes okay okay so why are you whitehead i mean especially from an intellectual point of view it wouldn't it make sense to test other things than that as well the thing is that the most of the companies i work with can't even be bothered if i do on-page seo well for big companies it usually they don't even need the links that just need to do be good yeah the rewards of that are astonishing and then if there's if morris needed fine then i'll happily refer them to someone else" }, { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": 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"datePublished": "2011-10-09T00:00:00.000Z", "copyrightHolder": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/about-me/#/schema.org/Person" }, "copyrightYear": 2011 }, { "@type": "VideoObject", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/omreport-com-joost-de-valk-part-2-2/#video", "name": "OMReport.com - Joost de Valk Part 2/2", "description": "", "isPartOf": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/omreport-com-joost-de-valk-part-2-2/" }, "thumbnailUrl": "https://img.youtube.com/vi/BIlgiAg-0K4/maxresdefault.jpg", "embedUrl": "https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/BIlgiAg-0K4", "uploadDate": "2011-10-09T00:00:00.000Z", "duration": "PT7M47S", "inLanguage": "en-US", "transcript": "usually someone here who's here now at SC Octoberfest and uh and tell them like okay if you you probably need more links or something like that go work with him or with her or whatever okay so you have some uh does it work the other way around the guys who are more from the link marketing uh side of things do they do they talk to you when they need it yeah quite often you know there's quite a few link Builders out there who don't know that much about onsite SEO probably it's also a big difference you know if it's like a short head kind of task which you know many people can manage and then if you come to something that has several million products and it's like a totally different story the thing is that my the technique it's the technical side but it's also the Consulting side to actually get those companies to implement what you want to do so do you think that's like a communication thing or is it because you're like a heavyweight and it's more it's more politics and and yeah it's it's a bit of coming in as a heavyweight that helps because you you usually end up higher in the hierarchy in a hierarchy and it makes it easier to push things through so you think it's probably good that you're even a lot more expensive because then it makes your it gives you words more weight yeah absolutely I think that pricing has something to do with that yeah so is there is a is the day rate of yoast official or not not so it is yeah my day rate is two and a half thousand Euros which is not even that expensive more expensive ones yeah it does cover quite a few in those rooms now but then in the States you know it's a whole different ball game right well two and a half hours a year is used to be um not that much but it is now a lot in the states and that's not because of the Euro that's because of the crappy dollar so yeah so now you're going to adjust your rates no no it's just people from the US it's just okay as it is and I usually make project prices anyway or retainers for longer periods but it's around that okay Mark okay so how would you think if you said you worked mostly with us clients so how do you think what's the difference between SEO and the US and SEO in Germany do you think there is a difference and yeah everything happens earlier in the US so um do you think like Google algorithmic changes yeah and um then this is like a very small difference I would say right no it's some stuff happens like six months earlier in the US and and in Germany it's a bit faster in Holland it's like waiting for years sometimes um also their language recognition in English is still so much better than any other language so um I I would say that the biggest difference is actually that SEO is is somewhat different for these countries okay because it's just a little bit behind yeah yeah and it's a it's a bit more competitive in the states for a lot of terms although Germany can get very competitive for terms as well so what do you think about the the the the interwining of Social and SEO do you think that is different in in the states in in Europe because it may be the same thing you know that the same thing will happen here just a little bit later but again it may be that they just use it differently a bit above it will happen because there are probably the best signals Google is ever going to get for ranking if they're gonna get them from Facebook you know they won't get them for Facebook but they'll scrape them off of Facebook like buttons and stuff like that um I think there's one company present here who's going to show something about that yeah but yeah they uh they'll use those signals and time will tell of what will happen exactly for now I'm just focusing on all of them and images on all of them just making sure that you have good links and and do the social stuff well the funny thing is that it makes sense to do it all well because getting normal links without doing the social stuff well it's pretty hard you think so why that because if you want to why have at least because you actually have to be talked about and for people to link to you do you have to talk about you and the way they talk about you right now is using those social channels so it all ties into one another and I do think that they will use them as tax and balance against each other so if you if they see very little social traffic about your side and they see a lot of new incoming links and it's a very good way for them to see oh wait there's something weird is happening again there's stuff that people are shy to talk about we just have another presentation we had the example of online dating people usually still shy to to admit that they do online dating my mom for instance does a relationship therapy that's not the kind of thing that people are going to do no no no no they won't even add your Facebook no absolutely not so that makes that stuff harder and at the same time that's the problem that all her competitors have as well so it's not a real problem so it will be there will have there will be huge differentiators depending on what yeah that's already happening anyway I mean shopping search is completely different from so Google is differentiating a whole an awful lot between all those things anyway and basically Google is turning into a lot of different vertical searches so tell me one thing that really pisses you off in search you know the interview is so calm so far there's quite a few things that piss me off quite badly and the the thing that pisses me off most is people using 10 year old techniques a 10 year old black hat techniques and still ranking with them because Google doesn't bother to [ ] fix it because it's like in in countries where Google is just yeah when I still encounter insights ranking with no frame spam for instance I you see that happening in Holland every once in a while I'm like [ ] and does it do you do you have a feeling that at least works just for shorter periods no it works quite well for and it's and there's a lot of stuff like that that just works and the noise is [ ] do you think it's probably because it's just you know Holland is not their focus and then right it's not entertainment this spam it's just like such a little part it just doesn't make sense to take care of it it's true it's the same thing I mean they said it they do something about scrapers now look at indeed.com or indeed.nl or all these job scraping sites I mean those are incredibly big scrapings so actually doing some good work job on the metadata I think yeah but yeah but they make their [ ] results basis look like Google yeah so I click on a search result and I get to a search result I thought Google was against that but apparently that's a different bowl game for some of those sites so that pisses me off okay so what do you think how will that solve because Google is any vertical at some point of time and then the scrapers in that area die as well yeah Google file the patent on job search last week and uh so before jobs are three to six months before Google will release job search those sites will start dropping in rankings you can wait for that we have a Mystic update parallel to that yeah take care of some other stuff as well and then accidentally all the jobs scraper science will go down yeah it would just be a side effect of the special uh uh update named after some other animal right yeah or engineer or whatever it is between yeah absolutely all right thanks a lot thank you om report and Android IPA would like to thank you for your attention you can get more episodes on www.omreport.com" }, { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/panel-discussion-the-future-of-wordpress/#breadcrumb", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://joost.blog/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Videos", "item": "https://joost.blog/videos/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Panel Discussion “The Future of WordPress” with Francesca Marano, Joost de Valk and Sé Reed.", "item": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/panel-discussion-the-future-of-wordpress/" } } ] }, { "@type": "WebPage", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/panel-discussion-the-future-of-wordpress/", "url": 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"https://img.youtube.com/vi/eeSpgEKcHlQ/maxresdefault.jpg", "embedUrl": "https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/eeSpgEKcHlQ", "uploadDate": "2025-06-10T00:00:00.000Z", "duration": "PT26M55S", "inLanguage": "en-US", "transcript": "[Applause] And because I can never stick to a script, the next session was supposed to be a panel with me asking say please. Now, now it's time. There's your microphone. Hello. Okay. Okay. Um color. we can do this. We're tech people. We got this. Um, so I was like, I mean, yeah, we can do a panel. We can ask each other questions and we can, you know, but it's 9 something p.m. Oh, 900 p.m. We had a long day at work in Europe. You had a long evening here. So, we're going to do it a bit differently. Uh, so we're making a Q&A from the public. But first, you that's you. So I actually because well I don't know are there any other Italians here in the room? Okay. So in Italy we have this thing that um when you have a show there's always a beautiful half naked woman taking the microphone around. No, no, no. But you I mean go for it. No, but when I was young, when I was young, that was actually one of my dreams to do that job. So, I really wanted to come to the audience and be like, \"Hey, do you have something to ask?\" But they're wired, so I cannot do that. So, I not even this time I can fulfill my dream of being a half naked microphone lady. That's very sad. But bear with me. Next time we'll be better prepared. Um, not even definitely not in the script. Of course it's not because the other dream and that's where I'm throwing your Italian. I think that's that's when I'm throwing your curveball. This is has just become a karaoke. No, I'm I'm actually okay with that. I will do then I asked Carrie back on stage. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. We'll do we'll do Q&A. We'll do a panel. Song would be really good. Sorry. You're so vain. I am think I bet you think this distribution package is about you, don't you? Okay. Sorry, I had to. It is. You asked for karaoke. I love the karaoke. And also, we joked from the beginning that if there was ever going to be another BDFL, everyone knows it's going to be me. But there's not a there's not one. So I cannot also fulfill that dream of mine. Uh okay, this is getting sad. Uh so do does anyone have questions? All the questions are going to be about fair, right? Are we real? Is it No, the question can be about anything. What does anyone have questions? I don't see any hands yet. No, come here. I want to take the microphone to you, but unfortunately you have to come up here. Did not see that. So, if you have questions, please come up here and we'll make it a party and then if it's there's enough of us, we can do an ABBA song. I care a lot about Hello. Hi. Hello. Uh, dear friend of mine, I care a lot about contributors. Yes. And I know that there's some contributors that would like to be funded to do some things maybe related to fair. What are your thoughts around how we can fund the contributions that could be related to fair? You know, one might think this was a setup question. It is a set. It was not. Surprise. Um, well, actually, I'm glad you brought that up because I was not speaking as the WP Community Collective in my talk, but I am the CEO of the WP Community Collective. Courtney is also a co-founder and our other co-founders over there in the audience. Um, uh, so it's it's good that you brought that up because there are a lot of contribution opportunities, right? new contribution opportunities happening right now. You too can contribute more. However, I, my compatriots and the members of the WPCC, which you too can join, um think that maybe the days of completely extractive volunteer labor should not be the norm anymore. Amen. Amen. So, uh we also can't go handing out money to people randomly. Weird. I know. I mean, she's That's where all of that went. I was wondering. That's a joke. We know exactly where it is. And actually, you can also know where the WPCC funds are because we're putting them on the website tonight. They're supposed to already be there. But that's all right. Anyway, point is, how can we fund things? We should probably open up an organization that is able to fund contributors for WordPress projects, open source projects in general, adjacent projects like fair. And amazingly, we have done that already. It already exists. Yeah. So, uh, we have this awesome Zen that I didn't bring up with me, but it's over there. Um, can you hand hold that up? Vlad Vlad Vlad Vlad is going to hold it up. There it is. Uh it tells you all about the WPCC and how uh we work so that you can um join and help fund contribution to all sorts of things, not just WordPress. Okay, that was a long answer. Thank you. Yeah, that's a lot of work. Extractive labor bad paying people good. Yeah, that's the TLDDR. I got that. More questions. More questions, please. Yes. Yes. We have another brave soul here. try. Hello. I was uh really pleased to hear about the plans to support premium plugins and I'd love to have you expand upon that. So, for the question, historically, every premium plugin has to well sort of work around WordPress.org, right? All the guidelines made it very hard to um do things and that led to most plugins having a free and a premium version. I think that with this we'll actually be able to make that a lot easier because you'll be able to find the premium version, install that and we'll need to figure out how you do payments etc. But most that you could do yourself as well. You could just handle the entire system which leads to much much much better user experiences because I'll let you all in on a secret. when we had Yoast. Never heard of it. Well, this small plugin, we we we sold quite a few premium licenses and at one point we discovered that a large percentage of our users never installed premium because they didn't know it even though they had bought it. You know, you can put uh notices in the app. Sorry. Oh, we had to go there. We had to go there. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, you knew that. You did know that. We did know that. We did actually do that. Um, yeah. No, we did that. Um, and it it's just it is very hard for people. And I think that what people have to realize is that what the WordPress a lot of us that are slightly on the other side of 35 um who speak for yourself. Cool. Now, but those of us who started on WordPress early on take a lot of stuff for granted that new users just don't do. So, new user experiences for WordPress very often already include plugins and very often have just a lot of these things already installed and they don't think about how to do that and they definitely don't know how to download a zip file and then upload it themselves manually and and click activate and or install and then activate because why wouldn't that be one one button? So, there is a lot to do. I'm sorry. H Ajax, sorry. Sorry. I I agree, but core doesn't. Um, no. So, I think we can make that entire system simpler, better for everyone, which makes the premium plug-in economy also better, which I hope will also help with innovation because we badly need it. Absolutely. Thank you. More questions. The boss man has a question. Oh. Oh, the queen has a boss. Uh, I have a question. Like last year in October, there was a law passed in European Union called cyber resilience act which is going to affect you know the WordPress core is going to affect all of the plugins. Everyone needs to be compliant and have a CE mark. Uh, how is fair going to tackle that issue? Thank you. Thank you. Um, can we pass this one to Ryan? That's a good question. Who Who wants to take this on? Where's Where's Ryan? Because he's actually far far better at answering this than you. Come on. Come. This is the open. Okay, we're moving into the open mic part. Do you have an answer or a question? Oh, you also have an answer. No, no, but we have we have a technical answer, but Ryan has a has a much better technical answer. Sorry. Congratulations, by the way. me too. Um, many of you might know or not that I'm also the president of the open website alliance consisting of typo 3, WordPress, Jumla and Drupal. And we've been the open website alliance was created because of the cra. Oh, right. And we are we put a lot of of the time to actually prepare and we we we wrote an open letter to the European Commission. um in two years ago about the role of open source. So um yes, it's going to happen. It's going to happen faster than you think. Um the open source um oh so maybe better like this. Um so we'll take care. Please come to us if but you want to you you you mentioned four members but I looked at your website today. Oh wow. Who uses websites? Never heard of it. No, actually um two years ago the world was a different one, right? So um we decided this week that we're going we because we reached out to um to WordPress. Hey guys. To who? To WordPress. Exactly. Oh yeah. Okay. Just checking. Yeah. So it's all about Udipus complexes here, right? So um I'm an open person and as as as you heard it before, I'm a p I'm a peaceful person. We should go the the the path of peace, but we should also prepare our communities for these things to happen. We should also um make sure that everybody's informed enough that they can do the right thing. So um please um rest assured that we uh are open to anyone who is in the open web right open for other open source um open web minded organizations. So if you think you can be part of it, we will take we will take care of that. I think we can. So, uh, Kareem is was already gesturing that he wanted to see. I can't be up here with these two guys. So, just your question. No, it's all of that. We haven't we haven't had a chance to tell you yet. We met with your compatriate today and fair is going to do everything they can to also contribute to your initiative. Yes. that I think that's called um collaboration. It is. It is. And so yes, let's uh let's dive into some of this. I you know I think I want to mention as well while we have built fair for WordPress, we have also designed in a way that actually any uh software system could actually adopt it. We've not built it specifically…" }, { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/seo-secrets-with-joost-de-valk-wp-elevation-wordpress-business-podcast-episode-126/#breadcrumb", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://joost.blog/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Videos", "item": "https://joost.blog/videos/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "SEO Secrets with Joost de Valk - WP Elevation WordPress Business Podcast - Episode 126", "item": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/seo-secrets-with-joost-de-valk-wp-elevation-wordpress-business-podcast-episode-126/" } } ] }, { "@type": "WebPage", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/seo-secrets-with-joost-de-valk-wp-elevation-wordpress-business-podcast-episode-126/", "url": "https://joost.blog/videos/seo-secrets-with-joost-de-valk-wp-elevation-wordpress-business-podcast-episode-126/", "name": "SEO Secrets with Joost de Valk - WP Elevation WordPress Business Podcast - Episode 126", "isPartOf": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/#/schema.org/WebSite" }, "potentialAction": [ { "@type": "ReadAction", "target": [ "https://joost.blog/videos/seo-secrets-with-joost-de-valk-wp-elevation-wordpress-business-podcast-episode-126/" ] } ], "breadcrumb": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/seo-secrets-with-joost-de-valk-wp-elevation-wordpress-business-podcast-episode-126/#breadcrumb" }, "inLanguage": "en-US", "datePublished": "2018-01-03T00:00:00.000Z", "copyrightHolder": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/about-me/#/schema.org/Person" }, "copyrightYear": 2018 }, { "@type": "VideoObject", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/seo-secrets-with-joost-de-valk-wp-elevation-wordpress-business-podcast-episode-126/#video", "name": "SEO Secrets with Joost de Valk - WP Elevation WordPress Business Podcast - Episode 126", "description": "", "isPartOf": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/seo-secrets-with-joost-de-valk-wp-elevation-wordpress-business-podcast-episode-126/" }, "thumbnailUrl": "https://img.youtube.com/vi/3ReChUxTPow/maxresdefault.jpg", "embedUrl": "https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/3ReChUxTPow", "uploadDate": "2018-01-03T00:00:00.000Z", "duration": "PT28M40S", "inLanguage": "en-US", "transcript": "[Music] can i clarify it is yost to speak and not used or juice it's yes yes yes doctor me awesome I have not been leading all my clients and colleagues astray for the last three years hello and welcome to another episode of the W feet elevation podcast my name is cath Hughes and I am a coach here at WP elevation I also run a wordpress design and development agency here in Sydney Australia so I'm really excited to announce that our featured guest this week on the podcast is yes debulk a man the mayor behind the cartoon character the heads up one of one of if not the best free wordpress SEO plugin otherwise known as Yoast SEO and in this episode Yost is going to walk us through getting the most out of his plugin what's changed what's new in content and SEO components and what we can be taking advantage of that you may not know about listen in and be sure to download the checklist checklist at the end to make sure that you apply what you learn in this episode stay with us this is the WP elevation podcast helping WordPress consultants elevate [Music] hey this episode of the WP elevation podcast is brought to you by WP elevation well more specifically it's brought to you by a bunch of our happy customers see frankly I feel a little bit awkward telling you how great WP elevation is because you probably not going to believe me because WP elevation is my baby it's something that we started over three years ago of course now we're a team of coaches and mentors and we have hundreds and by the time you're listening to there's probably thousands of members all over the world but it still really is something that I'm very passionate about and and of course if you join WP elevation we make revenue and we make profit so it's a little bit awkward if I tell you how great it is because you probably think I'm just trying to sell you on it and partially I am because I know how beneficial the program is so what I'd love to do instead is just introduce you to some of our customers so if you go to WP elevation comm slash the podcast all on word you'll be able to hear some of those stories from our customers and hear for yourself how WP elevation has impacted their business and change their lives I hope you enjoy that I hope you check it out at some point right now let's get back to the podcast hello I am cashews from WP elevation and I am very pleased and extremely nerdily excited to have with me ghosts of all okay the man behind the coveted Yoast SEO plugin Yoast welcome to the show thank you can i driving can i clarify it is Yoast to speak and not used or juice after me awesome I have not been leading all my clients and colleagues astray for the last three years for those of you don't know tell us a little bit about who you are what your background is how you found Jones self installed and four million-plus WordPress installations around the world so it's actually six and a half million yeah it's weird it's growing fast so I'm I grew up as a nerd let's start there and then I went into marketing at one point and at a certain point in my career that now just over ten years ago I went into a trade called SEO and that was sort of the the combination of the two where I could do marketing all day but still be developing in and playing with that and I built the plugin or I actually have built several SEO plug-ins for WordPress and at some point and decided to combine them all together and we're talking about five years ago now and I released him as one plug-in cook WordPress SEO that plugin got quite big and as at some point I had a million users and my wife said to me maybe you should start making some money off this and I said well you might be right and we started hiring people growing the company etc now we're a six and a half million and Yoast is a 50 people company and yeah it's it's insane it's the power of press that is incredible isn't it and I like to think so that most people wouldn't have to get to a million installs before they start thinking that you could probably make a little bit of money it's like a high benchmark and I wanted to keep the hobby I was I was a consultant for some of the biggest brands in the world so I was consulting for the Guardian which you know in Australia - and I was consulting for eBay and like so I was working on the bigger sites and I had good fun doing that and I wasn't making bad money so it was just a hobby on the side but when the hobby on the sides is there becomes that big yeah at some point you just have to switch so you haven't had bad inning so far and I have to ask you so have you spoken to Google lately the reason for this my son legitimately thinks that Google's was a lady who knows everything and gone oh no no you could give us the latest yeah well we regularly speak to Google to both ladies and men at Google to clarify our tell'em I think my my last call with Google was about two weeks ago but we have I think at least weekly interactions with some of the people on the search consulting and search quality teams to see like how can we help people better yeah and you're not making this stuff up then this is like qualified Google excellent disqualify Google it's like real people yeah yeah absolutely yeah brilliant so you know just given what we said about Google being that it is the real thing and they you actually have contact with them I wanted to ask some specific questions about your plugin and some SEO scenarios that we could probably help our audience and perhaps educate a little bit further down those lines demystify flight firstly video SEO it's become big we've noticed it and personally we just in plugged the WP elevation website into the Google your video SEO plugin and just switching it on and suddenly we've got you know our video is turning up in search results with a nice little video previews which is awesome do you want to talk us through what's happening with video SEO it's it was a lot happening at the same time it's it's also the standards have been around for a while so for a while you could get video snippets for every site on the planet and if you install our plugin we'd add some metadata to your site around every video we re index your site you've probably done gone through that process reenacting and then it figures out which posts have videos and it adds metadata to those videos so that Google can read that Google's forever playing with when they show snippets for sites and when they don't so when you get a video snippet in the search results you get this video screen shot before your entire search result which is highly enticing it's basically like an entire ad and not too many sides get those anymore at the same time what you do see is a lot more people switching to video search in google so in the top bar you see click on videos because they're looking for videos on specific topics that's working really well and that well that part of the plugin is is I think very valuable at the same time one of the most valuable features of the plug-in in my opinion is the fact that it actually gives metadata to Facebook and Twitter as well so that they show up there right yeah I saw this so I noticed that we could also choose whether or not we play the video in Facebook or whether we whether we can like take it back to the source of the video which is a great angle as well yeah it really depends on your type of audience but for some videos you want people to see the video and for some video do you want them to be on your site when they see the video because there's stuff around it that you want to see yes I potentially you could be maximizing the share ability of the video that you're putting on yeah yeah and it allows for more interaction there to be honest it really depends on what you want to reach so long we do a lot of videos against and when we do them we we tend to upload them to Facebook specifically because that works even better and we mostly want people to see the video that doesn't necessarily always mean that that's what you want so it our video SEO and allows you to take them back to your site or not depending on what you prefer it's a really powerful tool and I can see both sides whether you want it to be shared interests and shared or whether use something you're actually producing something you want people to go back to your website in our case like our podcast we want people to go back to the website and actually download the podcast and download and actually take advantage of the extra links and things that we're putting around that so brilliant plug-in though and and well worth checking out for all those who are listening if you haven't already so the next following on from that the question I want to ask was about some of the other tools in your product suite and they could be actually helping your audience because we talk about always being you know wanting to use the free tools but gosh for a couple of bucks you can really power punch your website particularly and it is yeah so we have a couple of things that I think are very very cool I personally think that local SEO is still undervalued so for everyone who does a local type site our local SEO plugin is probably one of the best things you can apply it helps you put up metadata so Google better understands your connection to Google to your local business page and it helps you put up opening hours and stuff like that it helps you put up a map so people can find you if you have multiple locations it even has a store locator building so you can it can work in the where's my newer shop that sort of thing so I think that's a really cool plugin we've got a new sessio plugin which really only matters if you're a new site which I'm guessing is not most of your audience but if you're a new site you should really check that out and then you've got our WooCommerce plugin which is basically an add-on to make sure that we'll Commerce and us SEO work together slightly better and we're looking at what we're…" }, { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/seo-with-yoast-for-typo3-joost-de-valk-yoast-richard-haeser-maxserv/#breadcrumb", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://joost.blog/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Videos", "item": "https://joost.blog/videos/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "SEO with Yoast for TYPO3 - Joost de Valk (Yoast) - Richard Haeser (MaxServ)", "item": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/seo-with-yoast-for-typo3-joost-de-valk-yoast-richard-haeser-maxserv/" } } ] }, { "@type": "WebPage", "@id": 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Joost de Valk (Yoast) - Richard Haeser (MaxServ)", "description": "", "isPartOf": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/seo-with-yoast-for-typo3-joost-de-valk-yoast-richard-haeser-maxserv/" }, "thumbnailUrl": "https://img.youtube.com/vi/W8n38MSfEUo/maxresdefault.jpg", "embedUrl": "https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/W8n38MSfEUo", "uploadDate": "2018-03-29T00:00:00.000Z", "duration": "PT1H1M30S", "inLanguage": "en-US", "transcript": "my name is Sud which is hot so today we would like to take back last year at this conference the man's person one of yours Ejiofor type 3 and since then a lot of things happen don't look back we won't take a look at how things are done at the moment which begins we have watched options and information about that and also a little bit in the future how to continue this development so for who is using the time trip within four years there is 32 he should really start using virgin teeth but that's just always should always update if I waited about better time it's good to see that only a few if Sophia to mo and my demo about also show some things about it to version but a lot of time three extensions go there and we thought something was missing a real solution for SEO not only the technical part giving you two options to add meta description or stuff like that yeah just looking for WordPress yet do we have to say that you we'll shoot for research purposes well the funny thing is I was in Tracy right Tracy's talked earlier and I all these things about marketing like how do we get right and how do we make writing materials and that what type of guidelines we get people to write [Music] it helps you solve another yeah much better yes it's not hot shot so we came up with some statistics you have over ten thousand two installations for yoga for our very presence thousands but for instance so the only the last 30 days is installed over 2,000 times and you have a growing number of contributors not all very large contributors but even a big reporting a big please please do so far we have 70 M days that's not completely right turkey without is 18 so check 18 because they're now at the present time things we already have if you've used the beginning you know we have to focus keyword analysis to redevelop the analysis you have to snippet preview and some show to share optimization who if you don't know this part what is exactly do and I can share promise so okay and as I said you just release version 2.0 because a lot of people who doesn't use 32 right now and the big change of 32 was that it's completely moved from method module into TCM so that part makes it possible to integrate into your own records so if you wanted excuse for example it's possible if you want to be your own extension it's possible so it makes it easier to use because as you know not only for pages but also for all other kind of record devil's mail change inverted to and besides that it's also having some small updates in the analysis the guys have used we every two weeks we do a release every two weeks of our constant analysis library so yes is a company that is basically here just 60 kilometers up north we have just over 80 people working for us right now witchetty move about is continuously working on improving our toxins analysis so we've had support for more languages we are better readability tests we add stuff around SEO that we think is better for how Google currently handles content on the site and also all these different things we need to change the update and try Richard Matsui has to update the plug-in and the other week to basically incorporate our changes so that's quite hot too because they have a lot of people working on this project and sorry ya know we made a statement and that's one of things from now on every month there will be another item that you're doing as well to sort of catch up with the device and every Monty analysis girls sorry yeah her mother for us I've seen the photo it's really a 50-50 companies so every month from now on there will be an update and that's just a small day maybe maybe just the analysis that is updated but yeah you having to see things yeah I hope it's a lot better than last year yeah last year I just found out that the responsive baton is not right the thing on a ferry or responsive has its limits yeah so but now I hope can everybody see things are [Music] we should get a better idea see my home okay like those sweetie Connolly yeah yeah max so friends that's different okay the third thing is that it is just and of all those bidders I wasn't aware of in the past demo here so yet each snippet preview just in the page doesn't isn't really changed one thing changed and that's this bar we've moved it more top and from accessibility reasons we also it's not only the green or the orange or red mark but also the text version to recycle in your comic lines actually yeah so but one of the missing features what we have the analysis here but we want to see them that's why he just a small change where there's more information on this place and you can see what if you're focused fewer and the analysis itself yeah so these analyses we work on a lot actually we have enough data coming out in a couple of months where we have we've done some research into all the bullet points as you see here like which ones are still valid which ones are different now in this day and age part of the works or coming out remove so there's an update coming at some point later this year where we'll change a lot of these luckily for him PS news update dude the librarian thing it all works what's very important for me to tell you at this point is that all these analyses are done in your browser so it is not done on a server on our side or anything else all of this is done in JavaScript in your browser so non of your content leaves your site and all of this all of it states right into you which is something that we value a lot and I've given the GPR we're actually very happy we did yeah so that's why if you take a look at together [Music] a pair to color coding is a degree orange right is it based on linear skill and as it may be easier to have to skill actually shape so you get an idea they're all based on different skills which is why we don't show the numbers because you'd go nuts although a few geeks in the world might say I'd actually like to see the numbers but the vast majority of people will probably say give me done these things if it's rapidly tell you yeah you should really fix that we also calculate an overall score as you can see the readability score I think is good but I don't know if you do you have any orange was because you can still have no overall support it's good even though there is a couple of things that are not as much to our lightning as we wanted to be so there so we we do differ in these things and we try to not make you over up to my top is the worst speaking the world is overall to my success he owned a company which is one of the reasons why we started working on readability tether checks because the SEO world has not done itself a very good surface and how it has promoted itself in the last decade and there's a lot of that copy out there with like very optimized text so if you want to buy this tear and you should get this chair at this chair shop which also has a lot of other chairs and it's absolutely horrendous so we try to actually make you write text that's readable and fun to read but he answered a terrific rating system underneath and you can look at the code it's yo sis you know da Jas on github all this open source so but at least look at it but it's a lot of work we have a team for linguists work on this all the time so there's a lot of analyses there and a lot of analysis actually is different for language as well so we now support eight languages we're having more I was just talking to was he has earlier we're currently working on Japanese which turns out to be extreme pain because there's this thing called word boundaries normal people call them spaces Japanese doesn't have those which makes analyzing text a lot harder so there's a lot of work that goes into a lot of research and a lot of underlying basic very practical linguistic research that we done Australian put into dis Sir Arthur is scoring underneath you could probably work how to much what's a seola scoring but I recommend you not to leave the shields on us seriously recommend yeah we tried to think and that's the one of the biggest changes that will make in this figure update come in here is that most bullets our actionable at that point every bullet will be actionable because I hate giving feedback that's not actionable so I'm one of the things that we do in WordPress but I don't think we can do in type of free and actually highlight the places in your copy where you need to work so if we say you've got like this much of your Texas pasta voice and you should change that to active and then you can just click a button and we'll show you what census is in your copier passive voice and so you can start changing them I think the readability thing we do that on a content based study and just so maybe that's the future it's not good yeah I know our heart workings are in constant that is going to be our - I've just put up this is just base properties of page and you can see these four here as well above all the taps but yeah you can see the snippet preview again and also choose t-mobile yes some small differences also in as your title so it's green for both still the big third day of the beta description man yeah for one of the updates of her yeah yeah who here is seeing that Google's results have changed in the last few months for results or usually have like two lines of description and suddenly they have like three four lines of description underneath we adapt to that in our student preview but we're also doing a lot of research into what actually makes it make the Meta Description show as a snippet if so if you resolve on what doesn't show on how can you make sure that your snippet is actually your Meta Description and what can you do about that Melissa so we're doing a lot of underlying research to to feed into that we try to keep up with what the result looks like Google and actually give you a proper symmetry [Music] I hope that I'm wrong in this but my current advice would be to not spend time writing lesson descriptions and just…" }, { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/sustainable-open-source-is-the-future/#breadcrumb", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://joost.blog/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Videos", "item": "https://joost.blog/videos/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Keynote: Sustainable open source is the future", "item": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/sustainable-open-source-is-the-future/" } } ] }, { "@type": "WebPage", "@id": 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"duration": "PT40M24S", "inLanguage": "en-US", "transcript": "is podcast in live video stream it's a real honor to be your host today my name is Chris Jones I am a serial entrepreneur investor and best-selling author and today we have a special guest he is has been a friend of mine for nearly 15 years or so his name is yo Steve all yo say hello hey everyone nice to be R so yost to those of you that are watching this in the SEO space he's a familiar face but I he actually is much bigger than just a familiar face in the SEO community Yoast is behind the famous Yoast SEO plugin we're gonna dive deeper today about the oast SEO plugin we're gonna talk about how Yoast just celebrated its 10th anniversary but just to put things into context here my buddy Yost has built a plugin that has been installed over a hundred and thirty five million times and he is on a daily basis he and his team of of nearly 120 people are managing about 11 million active users and did I get the numbers right there yes yeah if it's 11 million active websites so it's always a bit hard to figure out how many users that really is because some of those sites have 100 user and there's a couple of people that have multiple sites so you don't really know but it's in terms of sites we do now and while that is a lot of sites yeah these are these are huge numbers and it's so impressive because I remember you priest pre Yoast SEO plug-in so we're gonna dive a little deeper here let's start a little bit more with the back story let's let's talk first about you why don't you share a little bit more about your back story in two or three minutes just to give us and folks that are watching a little bit a better history of you yeah well so when we met I was at a an agency so I I started in the hosting space as a conman sales guy but I was I've always been a geek but in doing other things and at a certain point in time I my wife was pregnant of our eldest and I decided to work a bit closer to home and try something new and a new thing turned out to be SEO this is actually at and enough for no proper reason whatsoever at that time started blogging in English which turned out quite well because well the blogs were booming people were doing a whole lot of cool things in the SEO space I was adding my voice and people like that yeah so I got a vital to speak at some conferences after a while actually through our mutual friend Dave Naylor who introduced me to a couple of people after I attended one of his conferences and he said you should be speaker you should be here listening to me so he introduced me to Danny Sullivan actually and to Matt Cutts and that got the ball rolling got me on the speaking circuit and but I was still working at that agency and I had this wordpress blog as a hobby on the side explaining to people what was happening in the CSS world because I was all into open source and open standards already at that point and was doing a lot of contributions to WebKit the core of what is now a safari Google Chrome and even Microsoft edge so I was a committer in that project was writing a lot about that and was doing a lot of CSS free related stuff all pretty technical I was blogging about that and doing that on WordPress so time progresses and I built some plugins to help myself do the SEO for this site because as a consultant I'd learned a lot of SEO I would I was lucky enough this an agency that tried to be pretty darn good at it did imagine 15 years ago me being in a team of 14 full-time SEO s which is not I mean they're not even that many companies like that anymore your knowledge right now it's like it's mostly gone up into bigger agencies where we were pretty specialized so left that company joined another but continued and doing all the B's and sse host a bit more speaking i think i brought you to dan elements at some point for killeth affiliate conferences and some related stuff and well had a couple of these plugins was having fun with that and at a certain point decided hey I need to turn all of these separate SEO plugins I have into one SEO plugin so about ten years ago slightly more I decided to start doing that and built what is now us SEO and at the same time I decided I was kind of done with being a consultant for someone else and started doing now on my own so I had some customers that really wanted just me and I was working for the bigger guys at that time so working for eBay and did a very large project for The Guardian this would work for Facebook and I knew that I wasn't gonna starve so I started on my own and did that plug-in and that I built became popular to the point of becoming ridiculously popular and had me having about a million users after a year um and quickly figuring out that a plugin without a business model is a very expensive hobby yep and so started to figure out how I'm gonna do this etcetera this was when we both started attending our good friend Marcus's conference in Munich every year and um and by the way at this point at this point I remember you being it's so entrepreneurial I remember you being frustrated that many of us in the room had already built million dollar or multi-million dollar companies and I remember you standing on stage and in front of your brothers and sisters that's what we call ourselves that go to that particular conference and I just remember frustration and I remember you saying you know I'm gonna do something and to fast forward now congratulations on your 10 year anniversary thanks you were probably like a solopreneur is involved at you and your yeah so in 2010 I was alone in 2012 we added a couple of people my wife joined in 2014 she came from a college background so she'd been working as a professor and basically and she's a PhD right she's a PhD yeah and honestly at that point it was it was still quite small or was yeah so in 14 before we released yes I see a premium and and the real big growth started um and then I knew that we'd struck gold and I mean at a certain point you know like okay this is going to build a real company and and and going to be a bit bigger than what we expected but even then I didn't really expect to do what we've done in the last few years to be honest I mean growing over the last few years we've been growing 30 40 50 percent year-on-year and it's just every time you see that happen is it's a bit of a surreal experience yeah because it's just so many you and and you have to figure out like how do you do that and we've never taken investment so it's always been okay how much cash do we have what can we do what where can we put that money to work and yeah that's it's it's been brilliant to watch and I know you know success stories aren't always up and to the right you know they they have you know trials and tribulations and struggles and and you've had them I've had them but I want to segue into some of the meat and potatoes kind of peeling back the onion of this but two things one just to speak to the glue pulled off here I interviewed you for for an article on Forbes three years ago and at that time I think we had did your downloads at like 30 or 40 million so just to put that in a perspective I mean you've almost five times that as as organization but a couple of things and then we'll dive in what you've pulled off is really remarkable you've you've mentioned that you have been pulled dancing but but you know I've had now seven companies that I've founded that I've scaled you know passed a million dollars so a million dollar companies how do you do that and how did Yost do it well you start with a fundamental problem and that's what we're gonna spend the rest of the conversation on today is kind of talking about how you solve a fundamental problem that the vast majority of folks who had a website or struggling with and that's this idea of SEO and that article that you and I worked on three years ago the title of it was can SEO be automated and at that time you were quoted as saying let's see here you were quoted as saying that good software can take all the technical pains away but in no way can any software ever take away the content development task or the real marketing side of things this is something people are often mistaken about they think installing one plug-in or running one one or a few pieces of software will magically get them higher rankings it's just not that simple do you still feel that way or if you you kind of have you kind of changed your mind on that no I still feel that way it's I do think that we can we can help a lot of these processes with software I'm but every time I come into a discussion where people mention AI as a solution for everything and etc I just don't believe that anywhere in the ended near future that would like to the five year I had future our AI will be good enough to to get anywhere close to writing proper tax that is creative and against people to buy stuff yeah and in the end what you need to do is you need to as a way as you build your website you have a couple of challenges yeah you have what is your website about and what's your product and the most important thing of course is that you have a product or a thing that you're selling that's good then nothing can save you because that is what marketing is what you need to do is you your to the market and you probably can't help you after that of course it's tough to do and and that stuff is very basic but also very hard for a computer categorizing information is something that a computer is pretty good at when it's already labeled but if it's not labeled that's pretty hard to do for a computer sure so yeah so I think we can help and I we're trying to build software where we can help and help you write more readable text and help you better recognize the most important words and your copy may be or it stuff like that but um I do think that that it's that in the end marketing is always going to be a blend of tech yeah and we can provide the tech you have to bring the creativity I think the interesting thing about how honest…" }, { "@type": "BreadcrumbList", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/the-business-of-open-source/#breadcrumb", "itemListElement": [ { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 1, "name": "Home", "item": "https://joost.blog/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 2, "name": "Videos", "item": "https://joost.blog/videos/" }, { "@type": "ListItem", "position": 3, "name": "Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt: Thrive for the future – the business of open source", "item": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/the-business-of-open-source/" } } ] }, { "@type": "WebPage", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/the-business-of-open-source/", "url": "https://joost.blog/videos/the-business-of-open-source/", "name": "Joost de Valk and Marieke van de Rakt: Thrive for the future – the business of open source", "isPartOf": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/#/schema.org/WebSite" }, "potentialAction": [ { "@type": "ReadAction", "target": [ 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whether they might not already be using it too at some point. I didn't think we're there yet, but we'll be there very soon in terms of enough sites using it, that it could be a signal that they see so often that the system start using it. (bright ambient music) - Hey, welcome everybody, this is Sebastiaan van der Lans, founder of WordProof where we fight for a trustworthy internet. And we do that through blockchain, timestamps, open source technology. And with me is a very special guest today, it's Joost de Valk and he has quite a remarkable track record in making the internet a better place. What I admire on your work and your vision is we met I guess the first time, maybe it's a decade ago there you did a talk Somewhere around that, yeah. Somewhere around that. And you did a talk on holistic SEO by then I didn't know what the word holistic meant. (laughs) But one of the guiding principles you learned me there was the only sustainable way to rank high in the search engines is to be the best result. Yeah. That's the only sustainable strategy for over more than a decade. Yeah. I sound like a broken record when I tell people that now. But yeah, that's what I've been telling people for more than a decade now. I've been in search for 15 years. And it turns out that when you optimize for the end goal, for what Google optimizes for and other search engine optimizes for, they optimize for getting people to the right webpage and that actually gives them the results that those people are looking for. If you optimize for that end goal, then you optimize for the search engine. It's that simple. It's very, very much getting away from all the technical nuance. And in SEO there's a lot of technical stuff that you need to take care of and that we absolutely do take care of and I think I'm pretty good at. But when I explain it to people, I always say, well, we'll take care of the technical stuff, what you have to do is think about how to become that best result. So yeah, that's what we've been doing for quite a while now. Yeah, you and Marieke and the team at Yoast did a pretty remarkable job there. You're really deep thinkers in not only how can we rank high on the short term but actually really deep on how to make the web a better place, not only technicalities, but also the understandability of the information, so well done there and I'm really happy. We are really happy at WordProof to have you and Marieke as investors in the company and advisors in the company. So yeah. - Well, we're very happy be investors. I think one of our core values is and has always been improving the web, just literally making the web a better place, but also making it function better, making it a more trusted resource for people. And I think that's where we align. And one of the things that with what we do is that I can help everybody rank their website better and everybody can use our software to rank their website better, but I can't verify what these people put on their website and I don't want to necessarily. But it is one of the things where you know that you're building a weapon of mass media war, that you're basically delivering to everybody. And what you can see that everybody's using it in the last presidential elections in the US, literally almost every candidate was on WordPress and every candidate that wasn't on WordPress was also using our Yoast SEO plugin. For sure. So they are using it, all of them to optimize their stories. And there are differences in truths for all those people. And I think that all these new campaigns, et cetera, show us like there's gaps to be filled in the web and there's a trust problem there that we need to fix. If we talk about the trusted web or that's the frame we love to use that we're proof building towards a trusted web through timestamps, what problems should that solve? So for me, the trusted web is a dream of where I can in the end trust what I read. And that sounds very simple, but it is a very hard thing to get to because it consists of many layers if we peel it down. Because in the beginning it is like, okay, so I'm reading this on a website, is this the website that was the first to actually publish this? That's the very simple first thing that I think we can fix with timestamps to say, Hey, this was actually published here at this point in time and we could then verify and compare to other sources and see that they were indeed the first. And that is an age old problem in Google News, especially where being the first is one of the most important things to rank well in Google News and thus get a lot of traffic from Google for being the first to talk about something. Yeah, it's one of the things that I think the web was very good at in the beginning. I'm old enough now that I'm slowly turning gray, mine is not painted on. (laughs) I'm old enough now that I can say I was in the web when I was 14, so I'm 38 now. So that's almost 25 years ago. Then it was really weird. I mean, it was really bare bones and it was really broken in many ways, but it was a lot more trusted, a lot more sources that made sense. And there were a lot more universities, et cetera, not all these other sites that also had opinions about stuff that they'd actually didn't know about. And somewhere we lost that, because we didn't build trust into the fibers of the web, I mean the whole web HTTP, the thing that we type into our browsers every day. People don't even know what it is and don't know how ridiculously insecure it is. And HTTPS is only slightly more secure. And we need to now add that layer of security to the web to be able to take the next step. - Yeah, perfect. And that's what we said at trusted web as well, where that's how we define the problem. The internet was about connecting computers with computers then we had society, which made sure that there's all kinds of systems in place, norms and values to make sure that obnoxious human behaviors like fraud, manipulation, and theft, that they won't thrive in the real world but on the internet, we don't have those systems in place. As you said, trust isn't part of the Internet's DNA. And wouldn't it be great if there's an open source way to make \"trust\", so transparency and accountability, in our opinion, the two building blocks that lead to trust part of the Internet's DNA in an open source way. Yeah, I think one of the things that you see now is that what is happening is laws like the GDPR and other new laws that are introduced basically all over the world, because everybody's seeing that we need to take care of this and that we need to make it safer, but that's applying laws to something that is inherently broken. And I really applaud those efforts because I think it's a very good thing that we were standing for. Privacy is something that we need to take care of. But it's also sort of broken because we're fixing it from the wrong direction and from the wrong angle. And I think that with what you're doing with WordProof, we can actually fix it in a better way. We can help people, we can help the whole process from the ground up instead of enforcing laws from top-down where you get all these annoying cookie notices and all these other things. Now WordProof doesn't solve all of those problems and it never will, but I think there's a good chance that we can solve a part of that problem and I think that's very exciting. I think that's a very good way of approaching, like, okay, how do we control for that? How do we make people trust again in what's happening on the web? How can we even as government agencies, how can we even verify that we published this? And when we did it exactly? Because that sort of matters for a lot of these things. So there's a lot of these problems where they are now applying laws and I'd like to have those laws also baked into the technology. And what we discussed before was there's \"the unregulated internet\", as a logical next step with wonderful intention behind it. There's \"GDPR\" to make sure that at least privacy for people is a bit better. And as a logical next step, you have \"the trusted web\" where all information that reaches someone is verifiable and yeah, transparent and accountable. Yeah, as a logical next step. - That's what we-- - Yeah. Sorry. I think that those next steps are very logical to us, the only thing the problems that we will face there are that people don't actually understand what they're making laws about. So the whole GDPR thing was prefaced in many countries by cookie laws, et cetera. And people called it cookie laws, and I was like, I can do the tracking without cookies. I can do so many of these things without using any of these technologies that you talked about, because you don't know what you're talking about. And I think that now what we have to do as a society is agree on, okay, what do we think is acceptable? What do we think is and how should this work? And then we need to build that into the technology and I think WordProof is a great step in doing that. - And before we dive into the solution, what will happen if we're not able to fix the internet in the coming decade? - Well, not necessarily all very good things. Some people might not agree with me but I'm very happy with the current outcome of the US elections, but I'm very unhappy about a lot of stuff that I've seen there where basically untruths are getting spread far too easily, and we're not finding a way as a society of dealing with that very well. And providing people and our websites with the authority to talk about stuff. And for that, we have to verify them. And we have to know when they do that and when they publish something, et cetera. And yeah, I think that's a problem we need to fix. And that doesn't mean just you and me, but more people. But yeah, I think we can play a role in that. 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"breadcrumb": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/wpcoffeetalk-joost-de-valk/#breadcrumb" }, "inLanguage": "en-US", "datePublished": "2024-04-29T00:00:00.000Z", "copyrightHolder": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/about-me/#/schema.org/Person" }, "copyrightYear": 2024 }, { "@type": "VideoObject", "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/wpcoffeetalk-joost-de-valk/#video", "name": "WPCoffeeTalk: Joost de Valk", "description": "", "isPartOf": { "@id": "https://joost.blog/videos/wpcoffeetalk-joost-de-valk/" }, "thumbnailUrl": "https://img.youtube.com/vi/VnYT8GDceLk/maxresdefault.jpg", "embedUrl": "https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/VnYT8GDceLk", "uploadDate": "2024-04-29T00:00:00.000Z", "duration": "PT39M36S", "inLanguage": "en-US", "transcript": "welcome to WP coffee talk with your podcast Barista Michelle frat where we interview people in the WordPress Community from all over the world every guest is asked the same questions and every guest has wonderful and varied answers about their history and their hopes special thanks to our espresso level sponsors blue host WS form and beaver Builder and now on with the show welcome to WP coffee talk I'm your podcast Barista Michelle frette serving up the P the WordPress stories from around the globe and today my guest is the one and only yosa Valk who is the part is a partner the partner one of the partners at Amelia Capital you might recognize his name from other projects too in the past something little but uh we can maybe maybe squeeze that in there somewhere but yes thank you for coming today uh welcome to thank you for having me great to see you again it's good to see you too I feel like we should have done this years ago but I'm we should I never get invited to do stuff because people think I've already done it and then I've never done most of these things I mean I did I did have the most important person in your life on my show a few years ago but uh and she was wonderful by the way but you know you can come in second she is my better it's my she's my better half and you you are I won't respond to the coming secondary that is you guys are wonderful I love your family and I've had the occasion to meet your son also um your oldest who spoke at word Camp Europe and then we also had him on underrepresented in TCH webinar series about um people under 25 and he is significantly under 25 he is uh 17 yeah so that is slightly under under 25 I eight years is not much anymore when when you're my age Michelle it's like oh oh honey I got you beat and my kid's 31 but that's a tale for another day so for those who may not know who you are why did you tell us about yourself and what you do so uh I'm the founder of a company called yast y the Builds an SEO plugin that you might or might might not have heard of um we I found it out in 2010 and my lovely wife joined me quite soon after and we ran the company together for quite some time with a couple of other very nice people um and then we sold it in 2021 to new full digital um after that we started investing well we we started investing a bit before that already but we made we started doing more of it after we sold our company um we do that through a company called Emelia Capital um and uh so yeah I'm one of the two partners at Amelia cap Capital my my wife is also the other partner and so we are Partners in many ways it's a good thing you get along it's a good thing we get along yeah absolutely um and uh so we we invest but we're also working on new projects uh actually hoping to release the first bable thing soon uh exciting so yeah no it's um good fun awesome yeah I just yeah nothing but props every time I have conversations with you or Ma I just I leave with my face hurting because I smile too much so go easy on me today I'll try so one of the things I always ask people on on the show as people know is to bring a mug um show us your mug tell us the story behind it if there is one and tell us what you're drinking so I'm drinking coffee and okay I'll be known as the person with the smallest mug is what you already told me yes um this is a very simple Nespresso mug because we have very nice Nespresso machines here in the office which we used to have well Yos still has too we are opposite of the street of Yos so um I I like to drink coffee I don't do these gigantic mugs because I'm European we have style I'm about to show you my 40 ounce M yeah no we don't do that I it's it's a thing in the US and the funny thing is I like it with my sodas so every time I come back from uh from the US to the neins I mean they sell Coke in 02 liter bottles here so that's like it's like what an ounce something like that small very small it's very small it's less than than than a can so so yeah um so then I like it but for my coffee I wouldn't want that much but I also don't drink milk in it I like my coffee strong and unspoiled well I have a large mug because I'm American and my mug is the love wins from the give have a gay day.org come uh swag that we filled a couple years ago uh to support that organization and it is like I think it's a 20 oce mug I I don't know 16 oce something like that it's big um and I it's beautiful thank isn't it lovely I do I I did so I'm 55 years old I didn't start drinking coffee till I was 48 years old never liked it and so if you start drinking coffee in your late 40s you better believe you have cream and sugar in there so mine is always sweet and always creamy um which is probably why I also need in a gallon siiz thing so it's a little diluted I need a little more of the caffeine I don't know we1 so and I started I I I'm 41 and started drinking coffee at 12 and I've been been addicted probably since 13 that's that's because you live over there and I live here I don't know yeah maybe it's because my father always made instant coffee growing up and that stuff is just nasty think not coffee yeah exactly exactly so um tell us how did you get started I don't actually know the story so I'm excited to hear it how did you get started with WordPress so I was a uh active in an open source project called webkit which is the core of uh Safari and chrome um I was a Comm a committer on that project and I was doing a lot of CSS testing um and because of that I started a site called css3 doino um which had a lot of like previews of what css3 would be at that point and how you could be using it Etc and I built that on WordPress uh the time I was working as an SEO consultant at a at an agency so I did some research and looked at like hey which CMS is the best for this and settled on WordPress because I thought it was easiest to me to SEO relatively well um and that's how I started using Wordpress and then I started building some small plugins for myself to scratch my own SEO itches um and those plugins lat later became MOS seos there was six or seven small plugins that it merged into one thing which it was at the time called WordPress SEO and later on WordPress SEO by Yos and even later on Yos SEO I a little plugin I love how you a little plugin a little a little SEO plugin which has turned into like the most downloaded I I don't know I'm making it up maybe but it's got to be at least one of the most downloaded plugins in the rapo if it isn't the I I think it was the at the time that we sold it was the most downloaded and most installed plug-in I think uh We've it has since been surpassed by some other things but I'm I'm not I don't know the exact numbers well my plug-in in the repo hello beautiful has 798 downloads so I'm coming at you I'm Sol I love I don't I don't know I have never looked to see like what how the repo works like when it ticks like tips over into different things like a million plus or whatever but mine still says 10 plus active installs H yeah no it it so the the the biggest it'll go is 5 million plus which is what it says for yoso I think the reality is for Yos is probably more like 13 million plus right now um let me see the the download numbers I haven't looked at those in a long time because that number is weird but my 10 plus downloads is actually still on par you have also have 10 plus you just yes absolutely now yosio has been downloaded 622 million times that that is a lot um I don't think my little my little forked version of Hello Dolly is coming at you that fast so I think we're good oh my goodness I love that though and I love that um and you probably I don't know if I've told you this before I know I've talked to ma about this but I ask people in the rapid fire questions the first question I ask is what are two or three must-have plugins that you would recommend to somebody building their own website and by far Yos is the most mentioned plugin on this on this uh show as well so it's doing something right I love and I don't know this was probably I don't know I'm not gonna guess I don't know whose decision it was to put the like the stoplight you know the red green and and yellow but that to me was like what I was learning was so brilliant I was like oh it's still yellow what have I have to do to make this green and I was and then there's a list of things you can do to make it better and I'm like this is how is this free like you give away so much have given away so much in the free plugin but we'll talk about that later first I want the next one I want to ask you is um when you when you look at websites whether you built them don't look at mine but if you other websites um what do you think is something that we as web Builders developers designers don't focus enough attention on that would make our sites better for the end user so there's a lots of answers to that and just one and and my biggest problem is that I can't look at a website anymore without thinking this should be better this should be better Etc it's hard um funnily enough I think that most of that could be solved with a simple course in HTML actually knowing which element is supposed to be used for what and then actually use for that that would be like so simple things like if something is a search input field at least make sure that it's also coded as a search input field if if I am if I'm on a checkout page and you want me to input my name then make sure that you use the right HTML to tell me that so that my browser can actually fill my name in it and I don't have to type because I'm lazy uh but also that would help with accessibility wouldn't it uh yeah with accessibility and with lots of things so so a lot of is is just knowing a bit better how it all works um at the same time I hope that we'll get to a stage where people don't know how don't have to know how this all works and they can just throw some blocks into a page um and have it work as long as you're using the right…" } ] }