June 7, 2025 — Taco will bring a team of experts to join him, creating a multi-disciplinary team experienced in various aspects of building a website. In a panel-like setup, the team will invite the audience to share their websites with them. They’ll review a few sites live on stage. From experience, Taco knows that every website has things we can learn from, either because they’re doing things really well, or because there are things to improve. By using real-world examples, we provide direct value to those who are brave enough to give us their site, and to those who secretly wished they had the guts to put their site in our crossfire.

They will make sure that there’s a fine balance between compliments and improvements, and that several websites will be reviewed.

December 23, 2024 — Imagine your WordPress business takes off. You’re growing—and you’re growing fast! What could possibly go wrong?

In this talk, I’ll share my journey of growing Yoast and explain five problems you will encounter while scaling your business. I’ll share the mistakes we made while scaling Yoast and offer our solutions in the hope you’ll be able to avoid the mistakes we made!

July 3, 2024 — Websites need maintenance, right?

Tools, hosting, and new AI features can help you keep your website up and running, but in the end, a site needs some attention.

Most of our sites have been around for a while, so the content probably needs updating and adapting. And if you want to start a new site, you’ll need to create excellent content.

And that’s where procrastination might kick in. You know you have to write those articles (perhaps with some AI help) and create categories or update the tags on your site. But it can be overwhelming. Perhaps it is something you keep putting off.

In this talk, I’ll help you to overcome procrastination on website tasks that need your attention. I’ll give actionable tips. I’ll help you set up a manageable plan. I’ll teach you tricks on reaching success with your tedious maintenance tasks, making those tasks much less tiresome.

Let’s plan towards progress!

Presentation Slides »

October 4, 2023 — We want to measure everything. We would like to be able to put all of our marketing efforts in measurable KPI’s. And, evaluate our numbers.

However, a lot of our marketing and branding efforts are impossible to measure. It is a mistake to assume that the things we can’t measure are unimportant or non-existent. Unfortunately, that mistake is easily made and very common.

In this talk, I’ll show you the unmeasurable effects of branding and marketing. And, I’ll talk you through what’ll happen if we would stop doing these kinds of marketing tactics. Finally, I’ll help you convince your boss to keep doing awesome marketing, even without the hard numbers.

July 22, 2022

June 2, 2022 — Sites get bigger. We keep on adding content but tend to forget to clean up. As the web grows older, more and more sites are growing older and bigger as well. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Google loves authority, so being around for a long time pays off. However, your website does need to stay fit. Old content needs to be updated, your internal linking strategy needs to stay top-notch and your keyword research has to remain fresh. What can you do to keep your website SEO fit? In this talk, I’ll show you 7 ways to improve the content SEO fitness of your website!

Presentation Slides »

March 19, 2021 — Learn the importance of SEO copywriting and internal linking. Get practical tips you can use to start optimizing your website.

November 17, 2020 — What started out as a hobby and a passion grew into a successful business. Joost de Valk built the WordPress SEO plugin mainly as a hobby. In his work as an SEO consultant, he saw what big companies did in order to improve their SEO. Joost was able to translate much of that in a WordPress-plugin. For years, Joost did not make any money with the plugin. And then the tide changed! Joost founded Yoast. The company grew into one of the biggest companies in the WordPress community. The journey towards such growth was like riding a rollercoaster. In this talk, Joost and Markeke will share the view from the rollercoaster. What were the highs and lows in growing the company? How did they grow their audience? How did they set up branding and marketing? Could they grow the same company outside of the WordPress ecosystem? And why is WordPress so immensely important to the company?

November 3, 2020 — This talk explains why humans and search engines love easy to understand web copy. It also covers (2020) Google trends (EAT and Bert) and offers practical tips on how to improve your SEO copywriting for websites.

January 7, 2020 — Everybody uses stereotypes and prejudices. They help people to make sense of the world. That being said, prejudice is the enemy of equality and inclusion.In this talk in will talk about how prejudice affects women. I will look into women in general, but also zoom in to women in the tech industry and women in WordPress. I will explain the origin of prejudice from a sociological perspective and I’ll talk about the consequences of prejudices against women in our present day western society and in the WordPress ecosystem. To conclude, I will try to offer some solutions to overcome prejudice and to try to make our society a more equal and inclusive place. I promise, there will be jokes too!