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!

No More Clubspaces. Now What?

We understand that many of your Region websites are on the Clubspaces platform, and now that is going away. What to do? We have suggestions of alternate FREE website options for our Regions to switch to. We’ve had some questions come up already, so I wanted to address some of them here in the blog (since they’re common and I’m sure others of you are having the same issues).

Setting Up a New Website
There are a few site platforms that have been suggested.

eTeamz is one option and possibly the easiest. It is free (with a coupon code – email sheam@ayso.org for the coupon) and they will migrate the site for you directly from Clubspaces, so there is little work involved on your end.

Blue Sombrero is another that has been suggested. It is also free and has some of the scheduling modules that were available on Clubspaces. With this site, you will have to migrate your own content. This can be as simple as copy and paste from the old site to the new site. Region 68 in Camarillo, Calif., has been working with Blue Sombrero to migrate their website and they are impressed with their services.

Active Youth Network is another youth sports site provider. This one offers advertising support but is another one where you will have to migrate your content. This provider is free as well.

Google Sites has been recommended as a site provider also. This platform is free and can be set up with a Google account. Sites can be set to private or public, depending on which settings you choose. For a simple layout, this can be an easy choice to move to. You will have to migrate your content to this platform, but again, it’s as easy as copy and paste.