SEO and User-Friendly Content

As an AYSO webmaster , you have your work cut out for you. Even to many seasoned webmasters, the dos and don’ts sometimes seem to be written by aliens in another language. You probably wear many hats and have many other tasks to perform as well, so making sure that your website is search engine friendly can sometimes fall by the wayside. Today we’re going to briefly discuss SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and how you can perform a few easy tasks in your day-to-day website upkeep to make sure your website stays code-modern and content-focused.

1. Get in the niche

We’re all about soccer! What does that mean for your website? Try to think about terms that folks will search for, and incorporate them into your content whenever possible. Phrases like “Local Game”, “Youth Soccer”, “Pick-Up Games”, these can be valuable for improving your search engine results. If there are ways to make your tour or activity even more specialized, then you might want to consider them. Perhaps you could mention your town, city, state, local fields where games are typically played? Providing a specialized offering means that the content you create for your website content in general will be more relevant to you, and therefore, your target audience.

TIP: As a specialized webmaster, you are the expert! Share your knowledge with good key words and phrases!

Where Are My Web Stats?

Web stats are an easy way to track your Region site and see if your hard work is getting you the traffic you want. If your Region’s website is hosted with a provider like Go Daddy or Yahoo, you might already have site statics on your site (or available for activation). If you don’t know where to find your site statistics, you can contact your hosting provider and they will show you how to access it.

If you don’t have access to site statistics through your provider, you can use Google Analytics. All you need is a Google account to get started. Once you set up your account, they’ll give you a code that you paste into the header section of your website. You’ll have to place the code on every page you want to track. It takes about 24 hours for statistics to start showing up in your account after you install the code.

Google Analytics is a comprehensive and free tracking solution. You can view visits, unique visits, browser types, what country the visitor is from, how long they spend on your site and much more. By installing analytics, you can see which pages are your most popular and which ones you should spruce up or make easier to find. It can show you what topics people are interested in and what keywords people are using to search for your Region.

You can learn more about how to add Google Analytics to your website here.

If you have any questions about how analytics or stats work, ask away in the comments!

Is Your Region Website Searchable?

When a family decides it’s time for their kid(s) to play sports, some parents are familiar with AYSO and are out there actively searching for your Region on the web. But, there are plenty of other parents that aren’t acquainted with AYSO – and may not be sure that there is any local soccer program in their area.

This is why it’s important to be sure that your Region website is “searchable” or in other words, uses positive SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices. For those of you not familiar, here’s a handy SEO beginners guide.

In a nutshell, focusing on improving SEO will ensure that your Region website ranks highly in Google search results – making it easy to find for those unfamiliar parents I mentioned. Here’s a quick trick to find out where you stand: Google “youth soccer (your city name here)” and see if your website appears on the first page of results. Yes? That‘s a good start. No? We’ve got some work to do!