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!

Help with Choosing Your Region's Website Host

We realize that choosing a web host can be a difficult decision to make. They all seem like they offer the same products for the same price. We've decided to break down our featured hosting providers so you can get a direct comparison on the features they offer.

Does Your Region Website Have a New URL?

It happened. As previously announced, if your Region used Clubspaces for your Region website, it was important that you converted the site before Sept. 3. As of Tuesday, all Clubspaces websites have gone "dark."

If your Region now has a new website, remember to change your website address (URL) in eAYSO. Your Region's website URL and other details are directly linked with AYSO's National Region Locator. 

WordPress for Websites & the 7 plugins you will need.

WordPress has become a increasingly popular method to create a website due to its ease of use, fantastic and helpful developer community, and the sheer number of high-quality free modules and plug-ins that can add fantastic features and security to your website. Here is list of the seven I recommend everyone start with.  

Akismet Spam Protection
Akismet is a spam filter plugin for comments. It is automatically installed with WordPress, so you simply need to go to your WP-Admin Dashboard and click on Plugins, find Akismet in the list and click Activate. A message will appear asking for your WordPress.com API key, simply click the link and create a WordPress.com account and then copy and paste the key back into your Dashboard.
 
Quick Cache
When a page is accessed on your site, WordPress performs some database lookups and executes a bunch of code. Ordinarily this isn’t a problem, however if you happen to have a lot of traffic all at once, this can slow your site right down. Quick Cache is a plugin that caches your pages periodically to dramatically reduce the load on the WordPress server. You can find the plugin at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/quick-cache/
Once installed, click on Plugins in the Dashboard and click Activate. You then need to click on Options in the dashboard menu and find WP-Cache in the menu. This leads you to a page where you can enable the caching. Don’t enable just yet, because it’s best to do this after you install your theme and have everything working, otherwise you can sometimes have trouble testing changes.
Note that to get WP-Cache working you may need to create some directories for it to write to. The plugin will give you details of what to do.

Clubspaces Customers: Don't Forget Pending Dark Date!

Don't forget! If your Region uses Clubspaces, you will need to convert your Region website to a new vendor before Sept. 3. As of Sept. 3, all Clubspaces websites will go dark and all information, such as pictures, calendars, and documents, will no longer be available.

Active.com, the owner of Clubspaces is converting its website platforms to eTeamz. For a coupon code for free year of eTeamz, please contact Shea McLaughlin.

Click here for other website options, or for help converting your website.

Choosing the Best Layout for Your Website

You have your domain name and your hosting, but now it's time to get your actual site up and running. Which layout do you choose? There's hundreds if not thousands of layouts to choose from. Does it matter which one you choose? Of course it does.

There are one column, two column, three column websites, and bunches of variations of particular layouts. The simpler your site is, the easier it will be for your consumers to use it. Don't put too much information on the homepage. Homepage space should belong to the absolute most important information on your website.

Clubspaces Announces "Dark Date"

As we’ve previously announced, the Active.com team is planning to retire the Clubspaces websites. By giving you this information as early as possible, it was our hope that you would start seeking out new provider options as soon as possible.

Telling by your response, and the amount of questions and suggestion we’ve received, you all have been hard at work looking for a provider that will suit your needs. If you ever need more information or a second opinion, feel free to contact AYSO’s Production and Design Department!

This post is to let you know that the official “dark date” for all Clubspaces accounts is:

Custom Domain Names – They Look Great and are Easy to Remember!

It’s difficult for people to remember a long name or long site address with a bunch of weird words or formatting. Phone numbers are only seven characters because it is proven that seven characters are the maximum a human can remember at one time.

Knowing this, it’s a good idea to get your website a domain name (and a short one at that!) that people can easily remember. The long Clubspaces domain names are difficult to remember, let alone type into the browser! Here’s how to get yourself a nice short domain name and hook it up to your website.

Comparing Web Hosting Options

We realize that choosing a web host can be a difficult decision to make. They all seem like they offer the same products for the same price. We've decided to break down our featured hosting providers so you can get a direct comparison on the features they offer.

eTeamz…an Easy Solution

eTeamz is partnered with Active, so it’s an easy solution for transferring your website. Active will do the site migration for you, so all you have to do is continue maintaining your site the way it is.

eTeamz is a sports website platform that is similar to Clubspaces. They have 75+ site design templates to choose from. All you need to do is drop in your logo. Their editor is simple and easy to use – no more difficult than using Microsoft Word. They offer a scheduler and a soccer statistics tracker module that lets you enter scores for Region games over multiple seasons. There is an integrated email communication module so that Regions can send out communications to parents, coaches, referees or whomever you need to get information to. The calendar feature lets you create a detailed game calendar with dates, times and locations so that parents can keep on top of their child’s schedule. They also have a product called MessageCast which allows the Region to send out text messages to anyone on the recipient list (Similar to Rained Out used at the National Games last year).

Is Your Region Website Info Up to Date?

As a Webmaster, you put a lot of work into your Region website. From making sure that all the information is up to date to figuring out the best keywords to use to improve SEO, it’s a big job.

Make sure that people can find the website! We’ve recently re-done the Region Locator page, and the National Office has started a push for parents to visit the Region Locator and use the tool. Once a parent plugs his/her zip code into the tool and sets the distance preference, all of the Regions in the area pop up.

In the results, along with the Region contact person and a phone number, the Region website link pops up. Make sure your website URL is up to date in eAYSO, or parents searching for your website and registration details, won’t be able to find you.

Why Choose the Active Youth Network For Hosting

The Active Youth Network offers website and ad hosting for youth sports organizations. The thing that’s emphasized most with their product is their integrated advertising.

Their advertising is completely handled by the company. They choose family-friendly companies to advertise on their websites. By accepting their free website, you agree to have their advertising on your pages. Regions can receive a share (70 percent) of the revenue from these advertisements, which is a great revenue generator for your Region.

They also offer a “QuickAds” solution where your Region can sell ads to local advertisers. These ads can be managed through the Active Youth Network website. By getting local ads, Regions can earn an extra 70 percent commission on top of the 70 percent received from Active Youth Network.

What Blue Sombrero Has to Offer

Blue Sombrero is a web platform that is specially designed for sporting groups. They are owned by Dick’s Sporting Goods, so they already have a foothold in the sports industry.

Their websites come with a content management system (CMS) that allows you to choose a layout and easily edit the content for that layout. They have a wide variety of themes to choose from, which makes each page consistent across the board. All of their templates are designed to work on all browsers, so you don’t need to worry about cross-browser functionality. Their free-flowing design adapts to screen sizes so it works well on mobile platforms also.

If you decide you want something more customized than what they offer, you can ask for a custom design (for a price, of course) and still utilize their site functionality.

Their websites offer some modules that could be useful to a Region, including scheduling and reporting. To utilize the scheduling module, all you need to do is upload your schedule from an excel file. With a few steps, your schedule is available on your website. As for reporting, they have a bunch of stock reports available for whatever kind of data you need, including player stats!

Does Your Region Use Clubspaces?

Websites are an important means of distributing information these days. It's almost expected that everyone and everything will have a website that is easily accessible with all of the pertinent information available at the click of a mouse.

AYSO recognizes this need and has a few solutions that make it so ANY Region can have their own website and maintain it themselves!

We regret that the Active.com team has needed to retire the Clubspaces products but it is to enhance and upgrade what they offer. If your Region currently uses a Clubspaces website product, We want to help in every way we can to make your transition a smooth one.

Here's how to transition Your Clubspaces website

How's Your Region's Homepage Doing?

How's your Region's homepage doing? I suggest using Google Analytics to check out your homepage's activity. This will help you figure out what's getting the attention of your visitors, and what's getting overlooked.

The screenshot above (click to make bigger) is an example of AYSO.org's anayltics. You'll see that every link has a percentage; this is the percentage of total homepage clicks that the link has received. If you hover over the percentage, it'll give you more information such as the exact number of clicks and the URL it's listed under.

We all know that the homepage is one of the most important pages of your site - it's the visitor's first impression and may determine whether or not they choose to learn more about your Region. Study your analytics and make some changes.

Here's a few examples of what may need to be changed:

Planning Social Media Promotions for 2014

As you know, AYSO turns 50 next year, and the National Office is busily getting ready for the celebration and all its festivities. 

Have you started thinking of ways to modify your Region's website and social media presence on our Golden Anniversary? Here a couple easy ideas:

Brand New Facebook Tools Now Available

The AYSO National Office wants to help make running your Region's Facebook page as fun and easy-to-manage as possible, so we've added a new section to AYSO's Region Toolkit called Facebook Tools.

Featured in the new section are tools to make your Region's Facebook page interesting, interactive and consistent with AYSO's national branding campaigns.

It includes...

No More Soccer.org

If your Region website still has links to Soccer.org, it’s time to fix them! Soccer.org no longer redirects to AYSO’s national website. It now sends visitors to a children’s soccer destination site.

All URLs should direct to www.AYSO.org

Happy Holidays!

What Does Your Title Tag Say?

 
A title tag (circled above) is the text that appears at the top of your internet browser, and it is often used when your page is shared on Facebook or Twitter. 

Taking full advantage of the title tag is a great way to improve the SEO for your Region’s website – be sure to include all the important words that not only define your page, but things you think parents/families might be looking for.

We have a class of RCs coming to attend RC Training at the AYSO National Office in the next few weeks. To prepare, I looked up these Region Facebook pages, Twitter feeds and Region websites. I was surprised to find that a couple of the Regions didn’t show up in the results when I Googled “AYSO Region XX.” If they had taken full advantage of the title tags, this wouldn’t have happened.

How to Make Your Online Community a Safe Haven

Did you know Safe Haven has an Online and Social Media Policy? It covers everything from Facebook and Twitter use to email communication. Here are two important highlights from the policy:

Never post team rosters with names, jersey numbers and/or contact info. While some families may think this is useful, it is very dangerous to have this information posted in a public place (Region website, social media page). If that information lands in the wrong hands, they will have access to important details about minor children – allowing them to attempt to contact that child if they so choose.