2011·10·09 · 8:44
OMReport.com - Joost de Valk Part 1/2
An early interview from 2011 where I describe how I got into SEO and WordPress, and what the early Yoast plugin business looked like. I explain my background: I studied theology and international business, dropped out, and went to work as a Java developer, but I had been building websites since age 12. I talk about how giving away free plugins generated consulting leads, how Yoast SEO was growing beyond a million sites at the time, and how I thought about combining a coder’s instinct with marketing.
0:06 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
0:37 seo okay i picked wordpress because it 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
1:08 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
1:41 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
2:12 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
2:43 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
3:15 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
3:46 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
4:18 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
4:50 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
5:29 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
6:00 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
6:32 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
7:03 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
7:34 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
8:06 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
8:37 good yeah the rewards of that are astonishing and then if there's if morris needed fine then i'll happily