Yoast’s mission: SEO for everyone
At Yoast, we believe that SEO should be for everyone. We believe in creating equal chances for everyone in the search results. We keep our mission in mind in everything that we do.
The history of Yoast
To understand why we pursue this mission, we have to go back in time. Joost de Valk began building SEO plugins in 2006 because he strongly believed that everyone could benefit from the SEO knowledge he had built up in his work for large agencies. As a true WordPress fan, he was able to translate his technical SEO skills into a useful WordPress plugin.
Until 2010, he had also been working as an SEO consultant, doing consultancy at major companies like eBay and KLM. That year he decided to take a leap of faith and give up his job as an SEO consultant to start his own company. Joost was mainly doing consultancy and website reviews at the beginning of Yoast, but also kept making small WordPress plugins that focused on improving the SEO of websites. In October 2010, he made one plugin of all these little ones: the WordPress SEO plugin (later renamed to Yoast SEO).
Building on WordPress’ mission
WordPress’ mission is to democratize publishing with open source GPL (General Public License) software. Yoast’s software is an extension of the WordPress software, which is why Yoast’s mission also builds on WordPress’ mission. And, we believe that WordPress’ mission couldn’t be achieved without Yoast SEO, as democratizing publishing is impossible if only a handful of people are able to rank in the search engines. Large companies with even larger marketing budgets sometimes dominate the search results. The Yoast SEO plugins, together with our SEO knowledge enables small entrepreneurs to compete with these large companies.
An equally fair chance in the search results
We believe that the web benefits when everyone has an equal chance in the search results. We love the idea that great new ideas and innovations can spread around the world. These great ideas don’t have to come from large organizations, they can originate from anywhere across the globe! That is why we believe that every idea should have a fair chance in the search results, no matter its origin. WordPress and Yoast SEO cover most of a website’s technical SEO challenges, but to seriously compete with the big boys, every website owner has to face content SEO challenges as well. With our blog posts, we try to help our audience write awesome and SEO-friendly content and to set up a sound site structure. We believe that using the Yoast SEO plugin and reading our blog should help everyone to have a fair chance in search. That’s what ‘SEO for everyone’ is all about!
Providing free online courses
Our latest initiative in following our mission is the release of several additional online courses – completely free of charge. We feel everyone, regardless of the amount of money they have or people they know, should be able to create an awesome website that ranks. That’s why we now offer free online courses like:
• WordPress for beginners training
• Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin training
You’ll be all set to start or improve your website and ensure its findability. In addition, Yoast SEO Academy is now included in the Yoast SEO Premium product at no extra cost.
Maintaining the mission sustainably
Pursuing our mission doesn’t mean we’re not trying to make money at the same time. Our profits enable us to keep on pursuing our mission. We continue to tweak and improve our plugins and we’re writing more and more articles about SEO. Making money ensures that our mission of ‘SEO for everyone’ can continue in the long term. We can have a bigger impact. And, it allows us to contribute more and more to WordPress core.
The premium version of Yoast SEO has extra features, which make SEO so much easier. However, all the essential features you need for that fair chance in the search engines are in our free plugin – and always will be. Our online courses are a powerful way to quickly learn about any and all aspects of SEO. Plus, all the practical SEO information you need can also be found in our extensive blog archive. It’s important to us that everyone – even if you haven’t got much money to invest – can benefit from our SEO products. SEO for everyone.