As someone born and raised in the Netherlands I of course know Joost de Valk; it's a small country and we're all on a first name basis ... Kidding 🙂
No, I know Joost de Valk because he's one of those rare folks that does SEO, writes about WordPress *and* adds value. It's uncommon to see those 3 rolled up into one.
Joost is a smart but busy person yet after numerous threats he willingly made time for a short interview.
You've been working with WordPress since when?
Started working with it in '06 I think, near the end, for my personal blog, which was joostdevalk.nl back then.
There's somewhat of a love affair between SEO's and WordPress. Is WordPress inherently more SEO-friendly because of it, the script, itself or is it because the structure and principle of a blog are?
It's easily changeable permalink structure and titles are probably what caused the love in the beginning. The constantly updating nature of blogs helps too.
Google, and other search engines, seem to love the tag and category structures as well, which makes sense: you're linking pages that are related on topic closely together.
You've written extensively on SEO for WordPress but if one is impatient or otherwise pressed for time, what is the single most effective thing to do or change to a WordPress setup that will reap good reward?
Setting the permalinks to something sensible, for instance just the post name, and making sure the post title comes before the blogs name within the