{ "version": "1.0", "schema": "https://entitymap.org/spec/v1.0", "profile": "core", "verificationStatus": "self-declared", "publisher": { "name": "Mabank.net", "url": "https://www.mabank.net/" }, "generated": "2026-08-19T21:27:07Z", "entities": [ { "entityId": "e_grp_services", "@type": "Taxonomy", "name": "Mabank.net services", "description": "The services Mabank.net provides to businesses around Cedar Creek Lake.", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_grp_services_c1", "text": "The services Mabank.net provides to businesses around Cedar Creek Lake.", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/services/", "pageTitle": "Mabank.net services", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "index" } ], "relations": [ { "type": "INCLUDES", "target": "e_web_hosting", "targetId": "e_web_hosting", "targetName": "Small Business Web Hosting", "confidence": "declared" }, { "type": "INCLUDES", "target": "e_wordpress_hosting", "targetId": "e_wordpress_hosting", "targetName": "WordPress Hosting", "confidence": 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"target": "e_family_websites", "targetId": "e_family_websites", "targetName": "Personal and Family Websites", "confidence": "declared" }, { "type": "INCLUDES", "target": "e_seo", "targetId": "e_seo", "targetName": "Search Engine Optimization", "confidence": "declared" }, { "type": "INCLUDES", "target": "e_local_seo", "targetId": "e_local_seo", "targetName": "Local SEO", "confidence": "declared" }, { "type": "INCLUDES", "target": "e_google_business_profile", "targetId": "e_google_business_profile", "targetName": "Google Business Profile Management", "confidence": "declared" }, { "type": "INCLUDES", "target": "e_website_maintenance", "targetId": "e_website_maintenance", "targetName": "Website Maintenance and Updates", "confidence": "declared" }, { "type": "INCLUDES", "target": "e_ssl_certificates", "targetId": "e_ssl_certificates", "targetName": "SSL Certificates and HTTPS", "confidence": "declared" }, { "type": "INCLUDES", "target": "e_website_speed", "targetId": "e_website_speed", "targetName": "Website Speed and Core Web Vitals", "confidence": "declared" }, { "type": "INCLUDES", "target": "e_web_analytics", "targetId": "e_web_analytics", "targetName": "Website Analytics and Reporting", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_grp_areas", "@type": "Taxonomy", "name": "Mabank.net service areas", "description": "The towns and counties in East Texas that Mabank.net serves.", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_grp_areas_c1", "text": "The towns and counties in East Texas that Mabank.net serves.", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/", "pageTitle": "Mabank.net service areas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "index" } ], "relations": [ { "type": "INCLUDES", "target": "e_mabank_tx", "targetId": "e_mabank_tx", "targetName": "Mabank, Texas", "confidence": "declared" }, { "type": "INCLUDES", "target": "e_gun_barrel_city_tx", "targetId": "e_gun_barrel_city_tx", "targetName": "Gun Barrel City, Texas", "confidence": "declared" }, { "type": "INCLUDES", "target": "e_seven_points_tx", "targetId": "e_seven_points_tx", "targetName": "Seven Points, Texas", "confidence": "declared" }, { "type": "INCLUDES", "target": "e_kemp_tx", "targetId": "e_kemp_tx", "targetName": "Kemp, Texas", "confidence": "declared" }, { "type": "INCLUDES", "target": "e_tool_tx", "targetId": "e_tool_tx", "targetName": "Tool, Texas", "confidence": "declared" }, { "type": "INCLUDES", "target": "e_eustace_tx", "targetId": "e_eustace_tx", "targetName": "Eustace, Texas", "confidence": "declared" }, { "type": "INCLUDES", "target": "e_payne_springs_tx", "targetId": "e_payne_springs_tx", "targetName": "Payne Springs, Texas", "confidence": "declared" }, { "type": "INCLUDES", "target": "e_kaufman_tx", "targetId": "e_kaufman_tx", "targetName": "Kaufman, Texas", "confidence": "declared" }, { "type": "INCLUDES", "target": "e_athens_tx", "targetId": "e_athens_tx", "targetName": "Athens, Texas", "confidence": "declared" }, { "type": "INCLUDES", "target": "e_canton_tx", "targetId": "e_canton_tx", "targetName": "Canton, Texas", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_web_hosting", "@type": "Service", "name": "Small Business Web Hosting", "description": "Storage and bandwidth stopped being the spec that matters years ago; who answers the phone on a bad Monday still is", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_web_hosting_c1", "text": "Almost every hosting plan a Mabank business gets shown is sold on two figures: gigabytes of storage and monthly bandwidth. Both stopped being meaningful specifications more than a decade ago. They survive on the sales page because they are easy to print, easy to line up side by side, and impossible to argue with. The arithmetic ends the argument quickly. In the HTTP Archive's July 2025 crawl, the median web page weighed 2,164 KB on mobile and 2,412 KB on desktop. A brochure site for a marina on Cedar Creek Lake, a boutique on TX-334, or a septic…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/web-hosting/", "pageTitle": "Small Business Web Hosting", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_web_hosting_c2", "text": "Shared hosting means one server runs many customers' sites at once. Each account gets a directory on a shared filesystem and a slice of the same processor, memory, disk and IP address. When a browser asks for your domain, the web server reads the Host header — the line in the request naming the site being asked for — and matches it to a configuration entry pointing at your directory. That mechanism, name-based virtual hosting, is why hundreds of domains can live behind a single IP address. The consequence is the part nobody explains at the…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/web-hosting/", "pageTitle": "Small Business Web Hosting", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_web_hosting_c3", "text": "In rough order of how much a visitor feels them: Time To First Byte. TTFB is how long the server takes to start answering after the request arrives. Google's published guidance treats 0.8 seconds or less as good and anything over 1.8 seconds as poor. TTFB is deliberately not one of the Core Web Vitals, but it is the floor underneath them — nothing paints on screen before the bytes arrive. Google's TTFB documentation is the reference, and it is readable. Uptime, and what the guarantee actually pays out. The percentage is meaningless until you…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/web-hosting/", "pageTitle": "Small Business Web Hosting", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shared_web_hosting_service" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_services", "targetId": "e_grp_services", "targetName": "Mabank.net services", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_wordpress_hosting", "@type": "Service", "name": "WordPress Hosting", "description": "WordPress is a maintenance commitment before it is a website, and plenty of Mabank businesses genuinely do not need one", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_wordpress_hosting_c1", "text": "WordPress runs about 59% of all sites built on a known content management system and roughly 40% of all websites, which is why it is the default answer to almost every website question. The purchase price is not the interesting number. The interesting number is what it asks of you every month after the designer's invoice is paid. Consider the release record. WordPress 7.0 shipped on 20 May 2026 and had four point releases inside three months, the most recent on 12 August 2026. WordPress.org's own position is that only the most recent release in a series…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/wordpress-hosting/", "pageTitle": "WordPress Hosting", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_wordpress_hosting_c2", "text": "The blunt version, supported by the disclosure data: it is almost never WordPress itself. Patchstack's State of WordPress Security in 2026 counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities disclosed across the WordPress ecosystem during 2025, a 42% increase over the year before. Of those, 91% were in plugins and 9% in themes. Six were in WordPress core, and all six were rated low priority. Core is not the problem. The two thousand lines of somebody's abandoned slider plugin are the problem. Speed is what makes this dangerous rather than merely untidy. For heavily…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/wordpress-hosting/", "pageTitle": "WordPress Hosting", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_wordpress_hosting_c3", "text": "There is no standard definition of \"managed WordPress hosting.\" The term is marketing. In practice a managed plan claims some subset of: automatic core updates and sometimes plugin updates; server-level page caching tuned for WordPress; daily off-server backups with one-click restore; a staging site; WordPress-aware firewalling and malware scanning; and support staff who will look at a WordPress error instead of calling it an application issue. The way to tell whether a plan is genuinely managed is to read the restrictions rather than the features. Real…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/wordpress-hosting/", "pageTitle": "WordPress Hosting", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordPress" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_services", "targetId": "e_grp_services", "targetName": "Mabank.net services", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_website_design", "@type": "Service", "name": "Website Design", "description": "A visitor to a local business site is trying to call you, find you, or check whether you are open — everything else is secondary", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_website_design_c1", "text": "Nobody browses a local business website. A visitor arrives from a search result, a Google Business Profile, a review site or a friend's text message, already carrying a job in mind. The site either finishes that job in a few seconds or the visitor taps back and tries the next result. Around Mabank and Cedar Creek Lake the job is nearly always one of four: Call you. A phone number they can tap, near the top, on a phone. Find you. The street address as selectable text, plus a link that opens their maps app. Check whether you are open. Hours, as text…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/website-design/", "pageTitle": "Website Design", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_website_design_c2", "text": "Two facts get tangled in every design conversation, and separating them saves money. Google indexes the mobile version of your site. Mobile-first indexing was declared complete in October 2023, and Google's documentation states the rule plainly: it uses the mobile version of a site's content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking. The consequence people miss is not about looks. Content hidden or dropped from the mobile layout is content Google may never index. A desktop-only sidebar listing your services effectively does not exist…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/website-design/", "pageTitle": "Website Design", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_website_design_c3", "text": "Most small local businesses need somewhere between five and ten pages. We will say that plainly because the industry generally does not: page count is the easiest thing to inflate in a proposal and the hardest thing for a non-technical buyer to argue with. The pages that usually earn their place: Home. What you do, where, and the phone number. One page for each service you actually want more of — not one for every service you are capable of performing. If you would rather not drive to Athens for a small job, that job does not need a page. About. Who you…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/website-design/", "pageTitle": "Website Design", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_design" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_services", "targetId": "e_grp_services", "targetName": "Mabank.net services", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_website_redesign", "@type": "Service", "name": "Website Redesign", "description": "Most redesigns that lose traffic lose it in three specific ways, and all three are preventable before the old site comes down", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_website_redesign_c1", "text": "Redesigns that damage a business do it in one of three specific ways. They are different problems with different fixes, and most agency pages blur them into a vague warning about \"SEO considerations\". Separating them is the whole job. One: URLs change and nothing redirects. A page that lived at one address for eight years now lives at another. Every inbound link, bookmark, directory listing and accumulated ranking signal points at the old string. Without a permanent redirect the old address returns a not-found error and the new page starts from nothing.…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/website-redesign/", "pageTitle": "Website Redesign", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_website_redesign_c2", "text": "All of this must be captured while the old site is still live. Once it is gone, most of it is gone permanently. This checklist is the practical value of hiring anyone for a rebuild, and it is the first thing dropped when a project runs late. A full URL inventory. A crawl of every address that currently returns a page, exported to a file. This becomes the left-hand column of the redirect map — not a list typed from memory of the navigation menu. Search Console performance data, exported by page and by query , for the full window still available. That…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/website-redesign/", "pageTitle": "Website Redesign", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_website_redesign_c3", "text": "The authoritative document is Google's own site move with URL changes guidance. It is short, and it settles most arguments. Use server-side permanent redirects where technically possible. Google supports several kinds and recommends HTTP permanent redirects such as 301 and 308. Redirect to the final destination directly. Googlebot can follow a chain of up to ten hops, but Google advises against relying on it; where a chain is unavoidable it should ideally be no more than three and fewer than five. Keep the redirects at least a year. Google states this…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/website-redesign/", "pageTitle": "Website Redesign", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_services", "targetId": "e_grp_services", "targetName": "Mabank.net services", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_ecommerce_websites", "@type": "Service", "name": "Online Stores and Shopping Carts", "description": "Owners are quoted one number for an online store, and there are always three — the platform, the processing, and the work", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_ecommerce_websites_c1", "text": "Owners are quoted a single number for an online store. There are always three, they behave completely differently, and confusing them is the most expensive mistake in small-business ecommerce. The platform fee. A fixed monthly subscription. Predictable, comparatively small, and the only number anybody puts side by side when choosing. Payment processing. A percentage of every sale plus a flat fee per transaction. It scales with revenue, so it starts invisible and ends up, once the store works, the largest ongoing cost by a wide margin. The work. Setup…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/ecommerce-websites/", "pageTitle": "Online Stores and Shopping Carts", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_ecommerce_websites_c2", "text": "Owners think of an online store as one thing. It is four separate jobs, and the split explains why quotes vary so much and why stores fail where they fail. The catalog. Products, variants, prices, stock levels, photographs, descriptions. This is where the data entry lives. The cart and checkout. Session state, shipping calculation, tax calculation, discounts. This is what people mean by \"shopping cart\", and on a modern platform it is largely solved. Payment. Almost always handed to a processor through a hosted field or a redirect, so the site itself…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/ecommerce-websites/", "pageTitle": "Online Stores and Shopping Carts", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_ecommerce_websites_c3", "text": "Current rates change and we do not print them, because a rate typed into a paragraph is wrong within months. What does not change is the shape of the surprises. The third-party gateway surcharge. Some hosted platforms charge an additional percentage of every sale if you do not use their own payment product, added on top of whatever your processor already charges. On an entry-level plan the combined effect can approach half again what you thought you were paying per order. It is disclosed — just not where people compare monthly fees. Entry-plan…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/ecommerce-websites/", "pageTitle": "Online Stores and Shopping Carts", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-commerce" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_services", "targetId": "e_grp_services", "targetName": "Mabank.net services", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_domain_registration", "@type": "Service", "name": "Domain Name Registration", "description": "The registrant field is the whole ballgame, and paying the invoice is not what puts your name in it", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_domain_registration_c1", "text": "The registry operates a top-level domain and holds the authoritative database for it — Verisign for .com and .net, Public Interest Registry for .org. You cannot buy from a registry and will never speak to one. The registrar is accredited by ICANN, holds a contract with the registry, sells to the public, and is the party ICANN holds responsible for your domain. The reseller sells under somebody else's accreditation. Most web hosts and nearly every design company offering to \"handle the domain\" are resellers. Your registrar of record is the…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/domain-registration/", "pageTitle": "Domain Name Registration", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_domain_registration_c2", "text": "You do not buy a domain name. You hold an exclusive right to use it for a term of one to ten years, renewable indefinitely. That structure is why lapsing is far more damaging than people expect. The cost floor is public, which is a useful check on any quote. The registry charges every registrar the same published wholesale rate for a .com, and Verisign has announced an increase effective 1 November 2026. On top sits a fixed ICANN transaction fee, raised on 1 July 2025 for the first time in over a decade. Everything above that floor is service, support…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/domain-registration/", "pageTitle": "Domain Name Registration", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_domain_registration_c3", "text": "ICANN recognizes the Registered Name Holder — the registrant — as the party entitled to control a domain. Not the payer. Not the administrative contact. Not the business whose name appears inside the domain. ICANN's Transfer Policy states that the Administrative Contact and the Registered Name Holder are the only parties with authority to approve or deny a transfer request, and that where they disagree, the Registered Name Holder prevails. Paying the invoice did not make you the registrant. Being in the registrant field did. That fact is the…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/domain-registration/", "pageTitle": "Domain Name Registration", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name_registrar" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_services", "targetId": "e_grp_services", "targetName": "Mabank.net services", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_business_email", "@type": "Service", "name": "Business Email at Your Own Domain", "description": "Mail authentication does not fail quietly; it fails as the sentence our invoices stopped arriving", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_business_email_c1", "text": "Three DNS records decide whether your mail arrives. They have unhelpful names and are usually explained badly, so here they are in the order a message meets them. SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is a list, published in your domain's DNS, of the servers permitted to send mail for your domain. It answers one question: was this message handed over by a machine the domain owner authorized? It checks the envelope sender — the technical return address used during delivery — not the \"From\" line a human reads. SPF also has a designed-in limitation: it…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/business-email/", "pageTitle": "Business Email at Your Own Domain", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_business_email_c2", "text": "Misconfigured mail authentication does not fail quietly. It fails as \"our invoices stopped arriving,\" usually reported by a customer weeks after the change that caused it. The chain: a message goes out without a valid aligned signature, DMARC evaluates it as a failure, and if your policy is quarantine or reject, your own legitimate mail lands in spam or bounces. You never see the bounce, because it happened at the other end. The failures we find most often: More than ten DNS lookups in the SPF record. The specification imposes a hard limit of ten, and…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/business-email/", "pageTitle": "Business Email at Your Own Domain", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_business_email_c3", "text": "The rules stopped being advisory in February 2024, when Google's Email Sender Guidelines took effect. They are the practical standard because Gmail is where a large share of your customers read their mail. Every sender to Gmail must have either SPF or DKIM. That is the floor, and a domain with neither is gambling. Bulk senders — more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail addresses — must have SPF and DKIM and DMARC, valid forward and reverse DNS for the sending host, encryption in transit, a \"From\" header aligned with the SPF or DKIM domain…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/business-email/", "pageTitle": "Business Email at Your Own Domain", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_authentication" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_services", "targetId": "e_grp_services", "targetName": "Mabank.net services", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_website_migration", "@type": "Service", "name": "Moving an Existing Website to Us", "description": "The website is the easy half of a migration; the email is what people actually lose, and it is entirely preventable", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_website_migration_c1", "text": "Most migration failures come from treating a website move as one operation. It is three, governed by different systems: The domain registration — which company holds the name on your behalf. Moving this is a registrar transfer and has nothing to do with where the site lives. The DNS zone — which nameservers answer questions about your domain, and what records they hold: the address of the web server, the mail routing, the verification records for various services, and anything else that has accumulated over the years. The hosting — the…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/website-migration/", "pageTitle": "Moving an Existing Website to Us", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_website_migration_c2", "text": "If you remember one thing from this page: the most damaging migration failure is losing email, and it is entirely preventable. It happens the same way every time. Somebody changes the nameservers rather than a single record, because that is what the new host's setup guide says to do. The new host's default DNS zone arrives complete with its own mail routing record pointing at a mail service on the web server, and mail addressed to the business begins landing in a mailbox nobody knows exists. Nobody notices for a day or two, because outbound mail still…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/website-migration/", "pageTitle": "Moving an Existing Website to Us", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_website_migration_c3", "text": "Every DNS record carries a TTL (time to live) — the number of seconds a resolver is allowed to keep a cached copy before asking again. Until the old record's TTL expires everywhere, some visitors keep reaching the old server. With a 24-hour TTL that means up to a day of split traffic, and any form submission or order placed on the old server is effectively lost. The fix is to lower the TTL before the move. Google's own documentation on changing hosting says it plainly: Consider lowering the TTL to a conservative low value (for example, a few…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/website-migration/", "pageTitle": "Moving an Existing Website to Us", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_services", "targetId": "e_grp_services", "targetName": "Mabank.net services", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_family_websites", "@type": "Service", "name": "Personal and Family Websites", "description": "A family site is not a feed. It is an archive with a table of contents, on a domain your family owns and nobody can switch off", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_family_websites_c1", "text": "Not everything on the web is a business. A fair share of the sites we are asked about have nothing to sell, and they matter to the people who own them in a way a plumbing company's site does not. Family history and genealogy sites. Somebody has spent fifteen years in county records, cemetery walks and courthouse basements across Kaufman, Henderson and Van Zandt counties, and the result currently exists as a software file on one laptop. Memorial and tribute pages. The obituary, the photographs, the service, and what people wrote afterward, gathered…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/family-websites/", "pageTitle": "Personal and Family Websites", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_family_websites_c2", "text": "The honest answer rather than the sales answer: Facebook is genuinely better at one half of the job. Reaching relatives is its whole purpose, it is where your cousins already are, and a post about the reunion gets seen by people who would never visit a website. Nobody should pretend otherwise. What it is bad at is keeping . A feed is chronological and algorithmic, so a story posted in 2019 is functionally unfindable in 2026 even to somebody who knows it exists. There is no table of contents and no index. There is no stable web address a cousin can…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/family-websites/", "pageTitle": "Personal and Family Websites", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_family_websites_c3", "text": "This is the question nobody asks until it is urgent, and it has a documented answer that surprises most people. Facebook introduced the legacy contact on 12 February 2015. A legacy contact for a memorialized personal profile can write a pinned post, respond to new friend requests, and update the profile and cover photographs. With permission granted while the person was alive, they can download an archive. Facebook's wording on the limits is unambiguous: the legacy contact will not be able to log in as the person who passed away or see that person's…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/family-websites/", "pageTitle": "Personal and Family Websites", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_web_page" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_services", "targetId": "e_grp_services", "targetName": "Mabank.net services", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_seo", "@type": "Service", "name": "Search Engine Optimization", "description": "An honest account of what search optimization can do for a business whose customers all live within twenty miles", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_seo_c1", "text": "If you own a business around Cedar Creek Lake, you have been called about this. Someone told you that you are not showing up on Google, that your competitors are, and that a monthly programme will fix it. That call was dialed from a list. So we will say the unprofitable thing first. For a large share of businesses in Mabank, Gun Barrel City, Kemp, Tool and Payne Springs, search engine optimization is not the right place to put money. The highest-return action for a business in a town of a few thousand people is a correctly configured, verified Google…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/seo/", "pageTitle": "Search Engine Optimization", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_seo_c2", "text": "There is a first-party source for what Google wants, and almost nobody quotes it in a sales meeting. It is called Google Search Essentials, and it used to be the Webmaster Guidelines. It has exactly three parts: technical requirements, spam policies, and key best practices. The technical requirements are short. Googlebot must be able to reach the page, the page must return a success status code, and the content must be indexable. That is the entry ticket. There is nothing in that document about word counts, keyword density, posting frequency, or any of…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/seo/", "pageTitle": "Search Engine Optimization", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_seo_c3", "text": "Google documents three stages, and understanding them tells you which parts of this work are finishable and which are not. Crawling. Googlebot finds URLs through links, sitemaps and past crawls, then fetches them. A page blocked in robots.txt, or one that returns a server error, does not get in. Indexing. Google renders the page, works out what it is about, picks a canonical among duplicates and stores it. Indexing is not automatic, and Search Console reports the failure in plain words: Crawled – currently not indexed . Serving. At query time…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/seo/", "pageTitle": "Search Engine Optimization", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_services", "targetId": "e_grp_services", "targetName": "Mabank.net services", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_local_seo", "@type": "Service", "name": "Local SEO", "description": "How the map results are actually chosen, and the one factor that no amount of money is ever going to move for you", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_local_seo_c1", "text": "When somebody searches for a plumber, a marina or a boutique on a phone, they usually see two things stacked on one screen: a map with a short list of businesses attached to it, and below that the ordinary blue links. Those are different products, generated from different data by different systems. Almost every misunderstanding about local search starts by treating them as one thing. The map result, commonly called the local pack, is drawn from Google's places index, the entity graph behind Google Maps. The thing being ranked there is your business .…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/local-seo/", "pageTitle": "Local SEO", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_local_seo_c2", "text": "You do not have to take a vendor's word for what drives local results, because Google publishes the framing on its own support site. Local results are based primarily on relevance , distance and prominence . Relevance is how well a business profile matches what somebody searched for. This is where your primary category, your services list and your description do their work. Distance is how far each business is from the person searching, or from the location used in the query. It is computed from them, not from you. Prominence is how well known a…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/local-seo/", "pageTitle": "Local SEO", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_local_seo_c3", "text": "This is the hard limit, and it is the reason this page exists. Distance, in Google's own words on its local ranking page , is how far each business is from the customer who is searching. It is measured from them, or from the place named in the search. It is not measured from you, and nothing you buy changes where your building is. Make it concrete. Mabank sits roughly eighteen miles northwest of Athens. Somebody standing in Athens who searches for a plumber gets a candidate set centered on Athens. Businesses physically in Athens beat a Mabank business…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/local-seo/", "pageTitle": "Local SEO", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_search_engine_optimisation" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_services", "targetId": "e_grp_services", "targetName": "Mabank.net services", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_google_business_profile", "@type": "Service", "name": "Google Business Profile Management", "description": "The listing most Cedar Creek Lake businesses already own, set up the way Google's own documentation actually asks for", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_google_business_profile_c1", "text": "For a trade business, a restaurant or a shop around Cedar Creek Lake, the Google Business Profile is not a supporting item on a marketing list. It is usually the whole funnel. Somebody searches on a phone, sees a map with three businesses on it, looks at the star rating and the photos, and taps Call or Directions . Your website may never enter the transaction. The profile is free, and setting it up correctly is an afternoon rather than a project. The numbers it reports back are closer to your revenue than anything in website analytics, because they…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/google-business-profile/", "pageTitle": "Google Business Profile Management", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_google_business_profile_c2", "text": "In rough order of effect, with an honest label on the evidence for each. The primary category. This is the strongest relevance lever on the profile, and it is a dropdown rather than a project. A business listed as a general contractor that should be listed as a roofing contractor will lose to correctly categorized competitors on roofing searches. Secondary categories add reach, but the primary one dominates. That ordering is practitioner consensus rather than a published Google statement, and we would rather say so. Being verified and not suspended.…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/google-business-profile/", "pageTitle": "Google Business Profile Management", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_google_business_profile_c3", "text": "Google Posts. A local search agency published a controlled test in which they posted weekly for nine weeks across three listings, tracking hundreds of keywords per location, and concluded that posts do not directly affect local search ranking. The test dates from 2021, so weigh its age honestly, but nothing better has replaced it. Posts are still worth doing: they make a profile look alive to a human choosing between three businesses. They are not a ranking product, and a monthly fee whose main deliverable is a weekly post is a fee for activity rather…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/google-business-profile/", "pageTitle": "Google Business Profile Management", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_services", "targetId": "e_grp_services", "targetName": "Mabank.net services", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_website_maintenance", "@type": "Service", "name": "Website Maintenance and Updates", "description": "What actually breaks on a small website over time, and what is worth paying attention to rather than paying for", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_website_maintenance_c1", "text": "A sign on TX-198 does what it did the day it went up. A website is software, running on somebody else's computer, connected to a public network, built out of parts written by dozens of separate vendors, and paid for by a card that expires. It rots quietly, and nothing announces it. That is the honest case for maintenance, and notice what it is not. It is not that somebody is hunting your five-page brochure site for the contact-form archive. It is that automated systems scan everything, that the parts your site is made of get patched constantly, and that…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/website-maintenance/", "pageTitle": "Website Maintenance and Updates", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_website_maintenance_c2", "text": "Six things, in the order they cause trouble. The content management system core. WordPress and its equivalents ship security releases regularly. Core is rarely the problem; leaving it years behind is. The plugins and the theme. This is the real surface. Researchers logged 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem during 2025, up 42 percent year over year, and 91 percent were in plugins, 9 percent in themes, and six in WordPress core itself, all low priority. WordPress is not the problem. The twenty-three plugins somebody installed in 2019…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/website-maintenance/", "pageTitle": "Website Maintenance and Updates", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_website_maintenance_c3", "text": "Almost nobody defaces a small business website any more. In one widely cited analysis of infected sites, defacements were about 4 percent of what was found, while backdoors appeared on roughly 49 percent and search spam injections on about 20 percent. That report covers 2023 and no newer edition has been published, so date it in your head. The pattern holds: attackers install something quiet and monetize you slowly. A scanner, not a person. An automated system requests a predictable file inside a plugin's directory, reads the version number, and if it…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/website-maintenance/", "pageTitle": "Website Maintenance and Updates", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_maintenance" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_services", "targetId": "e_grp_services", "targetName": "Mabank.net services", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_ssl_certificates", "@type": "Service", "name": "SSL Certificates and HTTPS", "description": "The padlock certifies the pipe, not the people at either end, and certificate renewal is now a job for software", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_ssl_certificates_c1", "text": "The most useful thing a hosting company can tell a non-technical business owner about HTTPS is that it does not mean the site is secure. It means the connection is private. Conflating the two is how people end up trusting the wrong websites and neglecting the things that actually protect their own. What HTTPS does protect is the contents of the connection from anyone positioned along its path: the coffee-shop wireless network, the internet provider, a compromised router at either end. It stops passive eavesdropping, it stops passwords and card numbers…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/ssl-certificates/", "pageTitle": "SSL Certificates and HTTPS", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_ssl_certificates_c2", "text": "Two pieces of vocabulary, then the mechanism. \"SSL\" is the wrong word and everybody uses it anyway. SSL was the original protocol; it was deprecated and replaced by TLS years ago. Every certificate sold today as an \"SSL certificate\" is a TLS certificate. We use the old word here because it is what customers search for, but nothing on your server is running the old protocol. The mechanism is straightforward. A certificate binds a domain name to a public key and is signed by a Certificate Authority browsers already trust. On connection the server presents…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/ssl-certificates/", "pageTitle": "SSL Certificates and HTTPS", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_ssl_certificates_c3", "text": "Let's Encrypt is a non-profit Certificate Authority that issues certificates free of charge, automatically, through a standard protocol called ACME. Its certificates are valid for 90 days by default, and it recommends renewing at 60 so there is a month of margin if something goes wrong. Since early 2025 it has also offered an optional six-day profile. These are the certificates every competent shared host issues automatically. They are cryptographically identical to a paid certificate of the same type, so a host charging a separate annual line item for…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/ssl-certificates/", "pageTitle": "SSL Certificates and HTTPS", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_Layer_Security" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_services", "targetId": "e_grp_services", "targetName": "Mabank.net services", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_website_speed", "@type": "Service", "name": "Website Speed and Core Web Vitals", "description": "Three metrics, three documented thresholds, and one question that comes first: does this site have enough traffic to be measured at all", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_website_speed_c1", "text": "As of August 2026 there are three Core Web Vitals. Each measures a different kind of user frustration, and each has a published \"good\" threshold in Google's own documentation. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) measures loading — how long until the largest thing on screen has rendered. Google's guidance is that LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading. Good is 2.5 seconds or less; poor is greater than 4.0 seconds. Interaction to Next Paint (INP) measures responsiveness — how long after a tap before the page visibly reacts.…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/website-speed/", "pageTitle": "Website Speed and Core Web Vitals", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_website_speed_c2", "text": "The third Core Web Vital used to be First Input Delay. It is not any more. INP officially became a Core Web Vital and replaced FID on 12 March 2024 , in Google's own wording, and FID was removed from Search Console the same day. INP had been promoted to a pending metric in 2023 with the stated intent of retiring FID, and became a stable Core Web Vital in 2024. PageSpeed Insights and the Chrome User Experience Report were given a deprecation window of several months before FID disappeared from them too. It also gives an owner a free and completely…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/website-speed/", "pageTitle": "Website Speed and Core Web Vitals", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_website_speed_c3", "text": "This is where the industry substitutes folklore for reading, so here is the documentation, close to verbatim, from Google's page experience guidance : There is no single signal. Our core ranking systems look at a variety of signals that align with overall page experience. Core Web Vitals are used by our ranking systems. Google Search always seeks to show the most relevant content, even if the page experience is sub-par. But for many queries, there is lots of helpful content available. Keep in mind that getting good results in reports like Search…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/website-speed/", "pageTitle": "Website Speed and Core Web Vitals", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_performance" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_services", "targetId": "e_grp_services", "targetName": "Mabank.net services", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_web_analytics", "@type": "Service", "name": "Website Analytics and Reporting", "description": "Two free tools doing two different jobs, and the discipline of reading months instead of days on a small website", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_web_analytics_c1", "text": "Almost every argument about website numbers comes from treating two different instruments as though they measure the same thing. Search Console tells you what Google did with you. Analytics tells you what people did on your site. Google Search Console reports on your presence in Google Search results: how often you appeared, what people typed, how often they clicked, and which of your pages Google has indexed. It is measuring Google, not your website. Google Analytics reports on what happens after somebody arrives: which pages loaded, how long they…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/web-analytics/", "pageTitle": "Website Analytics and Reporting", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_web_analytics_c2", "text": "This is usually presented to a business owner as somebody's mistake. It is not. There are at least seven structural reasons the two disagree, and every one is expected behavior. Different populations. Search Console counts clicks on Google Search results. Analytics counts page views where its tag fired. Neither is a subset of the other. Tag loss. Ad blockers, privacy browsers, refused consent banners, people who leave before the script runs, and ordinary script errors all remove hits from analytics. They do not remove clicks from Search Console, so…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/web-analytics/", "pageTitle": "Website Analytics and Reporting", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_web_analytics_c3", "text": "Search Console has exactly four headline metrics, and Google defines them precisely: clicks , the number of times a user clicked through to your site from Google Search results; impressions , how many times your site appeared in results; click-through rate , clicks divided by impressions; and average position , the average position of the topmost result from your site. The definitions are published at the Search Console performance report documentation . Several things there have no equivalent in website analytics at all. Impressions. How often you…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/web-analytics/", "pageTitle": "Website Analytics and Reporting", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_analytics" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_services", "targetId": "e_grp_services", "targetName": "Mabank.net services", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_mabank_tx", "@type": "Place", "name": "Mabank, Texas", "description": "A town split across two county lines, named for two ranchers, and the only one of these five with more young families than retirees", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_mabank_tx_c1", "text": "Mabank sits on the Kaufman–Henderson county line, and the city limits cross it. The historic townsite is on the Kaufman side; much of the newer growth toward Cedar Creek Lake is on the Henderson side. Almost every page written about Mabank by somebody who has never driven US-175 says Mabank, Kaufman County, Texas as a flat fact. Half the city reads that and knows the author is not from here. The name is a contraction of two surnames. When the railroad came through in 1900, ranchers G. W. Mason and Thomas Eubank donated land for the tracks, and the…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/mabank-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Mabank, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_mabank_tx_c2", "text": "The median age in Mabank is 33.1. Nine road-miles away in Gun Barrel City it is 50.8. That is a gap of nearly eighteen years between two towns on the same lake, and it is the single most useful thing to know before writing a word of copy for a Mabank business. Twelve percent of Mabank is 65 or over; thirty percent is under 18. This is a school-district town of young families and Dallas commuters, not a retirement community. Mabank Independent School District enrolls 4,104 students across six campuses and has grown about 21 percent since 2016. It also…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/mabank-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Mabank, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_mabank_tx_c3", "text": "US-175 runs along the north side of town and carries the through traffic — 21 miles northwest to Kaufman, 18 miles southeast to Athens. TX-198, historically known as Gun Barrel Lane, runs south toward Gun Barrel City. But the retail character of Mabank is not on either highway. It is on Market Street, which is a walkable historic downtown of independent boutiques, salons, a tea room, cafes and a restored bank building that now sells breakfast. That matters because it dictates what these businesses actually need from a website. A boutique on Market…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/mabank-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Mabank, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mabank,_Texas" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_areas", "targetId": "e_grp_areas", "targetName": "Mabank.net areas", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_gun_barrel_city_tx", "@type": "Place", "name": "Gun Barrel City, Texas", "description": "The retail hub of Cedar Creek Lake runs on a ten-mile highway and a season that starts in May, and your website should know both", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_gun_barrel_city_tx_c1", "text": "Gun Barrel Lane got its name because it ran straight as a gun barrel for about two miles between US-175 and what is now TX-334. It started as a mud-road shortcut across Cedar Creek linking Mabank to Trinidad and Seven Points, and it is now State Highway 198. The town that grew up around it took the road's name, adopted the motto We Shoot Straight With You , and put a rifle crossed by two antique pistols on its city symbol. Yosemite Sam served as the unofficial mascot before being replaced. The incorporation story is equally plain-spoken. City records…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/gun-barrel-city-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Gun Barrel City", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_gun_barrel_city_tx_c2", "text": "State Highway 334 is only a little over ten miles long, lies entirely within Henderson County, and is signed through town as West Main Street. It begins at a junction with TX-274 in Seven Points, crosses Cedar Creek Reservoir on a causeway, runs through the middle of Gun Barrel City and continues to US-175. That one road is the commercial spine of the entire lake. What is on it is categorically different from Mabank's downtown: a Walmart Supercenter anchoring the west end, drive-through national chains, new white-box retail going up in phases, salons…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/gun-barrel-city-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Gun Barrel City", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_gun_barrel_city_tx_c3", "text": "This is the most expensive mistake we see in Gun Barrel City, and competent people make it. They build a site, target the town name, rank for it, and conclude that search does not work here. The town name is roughly six thousand residents. The trade area is 75,000 people across a dozen towns and two counties. Worse, many of your best prospects are not here when they search. In season the population swells past 10,000, and in the ZIP code covering Gun Barrel City about 73 percent of vacant housing is classified seasonal, recreational or occasional use.…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/gun-barrel-city-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Gun Barrel City", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_Barrel_City,_Texas" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_areas", "targetId": "e_grp_areas", "targetName": "Mabank.net areas", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_seven_points_tx", "@type": "Place", "name": "Seven Points, Texas", "description": "Named for the seven roads that meet here, and a place most of your customers are driving through rather than driving to", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_seven_points_tx_c1", "text": "Seven Points is named for the junction it grew around. The city itemizes the seven: two state highways serving three directions, one farm-to-market road, and three county roads. The town came up in the 1960s after Cedar Creek Reservoir filled, and incorporated sometime in the 1970s — neither the Handbook of Texas nor Wikipedia gives an exact year, and we are not going to invent one. Like Mabank, it straddles the Henderson and Kaufman county line, for the same reason: it grew around a road junction that happened to sit near the boundary. Also like…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/seven-points-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Seven Points, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_seven_points_tx_c2", "text": "State Highway 334 begins at its junction with TX-274 right here in Seven Points and runs east across Cedar Creek Reservoir on the causeway to Gun Barrel City. That single geographic fact defines the local economy. TX-274 carries the local commercial traffic; TX-334 carries the through traffic to the retail hub. Seven Points is a place a great many people drive through on the way to somewhere they have already decided to go. Pass-through traffic is not the same as destination traffic, and it does not respond to the same marketing. A driver crossing your…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/seven-points-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Seven Points, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_seven_points_tx_c3", "text": "Seven Points had 1,455 residents at the 2010 Census and 1,370 at the 2020 Census; the 2024 estimate is about 1,167, and the 2026 projection is lower still. Every other town around this lake is flat or growing. Household income here is the lowest of the group by a wide margin — a business four miles east in Gun Barrel City sits in a market with nearly double the median household income — and roughly 23.8 percent of families are below the poverty line. We state that plainly because pretending otherwise leads directly to bad advice. Three…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/seven-points-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Seven Points, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Points,_Texas" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_areas", "targetId": "e_grp_areas", "targetName": "Mabank.net areas", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_kemp_tx", "@type": "Place", "name": "Kemp, Texas", "description": "Eleven miles from our office, at the head of the reservoir rather than on it, with a year-round rhythm instead of a season", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_kemp_tx_c1", "text": "Kemp is in southeastern Kaufman County, at the head of Cedar Creek Reservoir rather than on open water. It is the least lake of the towns in this part of the county, and that is the most important thing to understand before spending money on marketing here. US-175 runs along the northeast side and carries the commercial traffic — eleven miles northwest to Kaufman, twenty-eight southeast to Athens. TX-274 heads south out of town and is the road to the lake, down through Seven Points and Tool. So a Kemp retailer's customers are highway traffic…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/kemp-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Kemp, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_kemp_tx_c2", "text": "Two sources give two different women as the town's namesake, and neither is obviously wrong. Wikipedia says Kemp is named for Sara Kemp , mother of the first postmaster, Levi Noble. The City of Kemp, citing the Handbook of Texas, says Malvina Kemp Watkins , wife of the first postmaster, John Marr Watkins. They agree the town honors a woman in the first postmaster's family and disagree on which woman and which postmaster. We print both rather than quietly pick one, because a page that resolves a real conflict by choosing the convenient version is a page…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/kemp-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Kemp, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_kemp_tx_c3", "text": "Kemp had about 1,200 people in 1926. The 2024 estimate is around 1,302. In between it fell to roughly 816 by the mid-1960s and climbed back. The business count tells the same story with more texture: 60 businesses and two banks in 1926, 46 in 1936, 33 after the Second World War, and 75 by 1990. Historic industries were cattle ranching and cotton farming. A century of approximately flat has two implications, and they point in opposite directions. The first is that there is essentially no local competitor to out-rank . Most categories here have one…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/kemp-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Kemp, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kemp,_Texas" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_areas", "targetId": "e_grp_areas", "targetName": "Mabank.net areas", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_tool_tx", "@type": "Place", "name": "Tool, Texas", "description": "Almost nobody searches for a web designer in Tool, so here is what actually works on the west shore of Cedar Creek Lake", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_tool_tx_c1", "text": "Local tradition holds that the community was once called Hog Fork and was renamed for George Tool, who in 1905 had the first store there. That version is on every aggregator page in the search results. The Handbook of Texas adds a detail none of those pages mention: postal records show no official name other than Tool, with the post office operating from 1901 to 1911. The place was already on record as Tool four years before the store the name is supposedly derived from. Both things cannot be true as stated, and we are not going to pretend to know which…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/tool-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Tool, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_tool_tx_c2", "text": "Tool is in Henderson County on State Highway 274, on the west side of Cedar Creek Lake, about 23 miles northwest of Athens. TX-274 is the main road and effectively the only one; there is no second commercial street. The 2020 Census classified 100 percent of Tool residents as living in a rural area . The commercial base is genuinely small, and that is the honest finding rather than a rhetorical setup. Tool had four businesses in 1945. Today there is an RV park on the lake side, a gallery, a park, a civic center, and the trades that keep second homes…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/tool-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Tool, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_tool_tx_c3", "text": "At the 2020 Census, 37.8 percent of Tool's housing units were vacant, and in the surrounding ZIP code more than half of vacant units are classified seasonal, recreational or occasional use. Wikipedia describes the town, accurately, as a popular second-home and retiree destination. Roughly 27 percent of residents are 65 or over. Read that as an operating model rather than a demographic table and it says something specific: a large share of the customers for services in Tool are not in Tool when they buy. They are in Dallas or Tyler, and they need…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/tool-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Tool, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tool,_Texas" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_areas", "targetId": "e_grp_areas", "targetName": "Mabank.net areas", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_eustace_tx", "@type": "Place", "name": "Eustace, Texas", "description": "Eustace is a US-175 highway town east of the lake, and the customers a business here serves live across the whole of ZIP 75124", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_eustace_tx_c1", "text": "The fastest way to tell whether a web company has ever actually been to Eustace is to read the first paragraph of the page they wrote about it. If it opens with docks, boat lifts and sunset views over the water, they have confused Eustace with the towns four miles west of it. Eustace sits in the northwestern corner of Henderson County, east of Cedar Creek Lake. Athens, the county seat, is about eleven miles southeast; Mabank is about seven miles northwest. The town covers roughly 2.9 square miles, and US-175 runs straight through the middle of it . That…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/eustace-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Eustace, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_eustace_tx_c2", "text": "This is the single most useful thing we can tell a Eustace business owner, and most of them already know it in their bones without having seen the numbers. The 2020 Census counted 1,137 people inside the city limits, and the estimate series published since then has been flat to slightly down. Meanwhile ZIP 75124 holds somewhere in the range of five to six thousand people across about 98 square miles , depending on which data provider you ask, and the sources do disagree. Eustace is the only city name listed for that ZIP. So the postal identity of…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/eustace-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Eustace, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_eustace_tx_c3", "text": "Here is the statistic that separates Eustace from every lakefront town we work in, and it is the reason the advice is different. In ZIP 75124, about 16 percent of housing units are vacant, and roughly 42 percent of those vacancies are classed as seasonal, recreational or occasional use. In ZIP 75156 — Mabank, Gun Barrel City, Enchanted Oaks — vacancy runs around 27 percent and about 73 percent of those vacancies are seasonal. In Tool, more than a third of housing units were vacant at the 2020 Census. Read those three numbers together and the picture is…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/eustace-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Eustace, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustace,_Texas" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_areas", "targetId": "e_grp_areas", "targetName": "Mabank.net areas", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_payne_springs_tx", "@type": "Place", "name": "Payne Springs, Texas", "description": "A shoreline town with no post office, no school district and no ZIP code of its own, where most businesses are one person and a truck", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_payne_springs_tx_c1", "text": "Payne Springs sits on the eastern shore of Cedar Creek Lake in the northwestern corner of Henderson County, just south of Gun Barrel City and about fifteen miles northwest of Athens. TX-198 is the road through town — the only town in this part of our service area whose main highway is TX-198. The whole city covers about 2.12 square miles. The city describes itself as a mix of waterfront, residential, agricultural and commercial property along the highway, and that ordering is accurate. Payne Springs is where the lake houses are . It is not where the…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/payne-springs-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Payne Springs, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_payne_springs_tx_c2", "text": "Most towns have at least one institution that says its own name back to residents every day. Payne Springs has none, and this is not a rhetorical flourish — it is three separate administrative facts that compound. There is no post office. Mail service opened here as Payne's Spring in 1890 and ended in 1905. The Texas Almanac still records the town's post office status as \"no,\" a hundred and twenty years later. There is no Payne Springs school district. The town is split between Mabank ISD and Eustace ISD. Two children on opposite ends of the same small…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/payne-springs-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Payne Springs, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_payne_springs_tx_c3", "text": "The good news first. Google's local results key heavily on your physical location and on how far the person searching is from you. They do not key on the city printed on your mail. A dock service physically located in Payne Springs will show up for a lake homeowner standing on their dock a mile away, regardless of whether the invoice says Eustace or Mabank. The problem is downstream. Citation services, directory listings, invoices and your own website footer all propagate the mailing city. So you end up with name-address-phone inconsistency you did not…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/payne-springs-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Payne Springs, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payne_Springs,_Texas" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_areas", "targetId": "e_grp_areas", "targetName": "Mabank.net areas", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_kaufman_tx", "@type": "Place", "name": "Kaufman, Texas", "description": "This is our own town, so we will be blunt about it: Kaufman is the hardest market we work in, and the reason is Dallas", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_kaufman_tx_c1", "text": "Every other page on this site is written by a company describing a town it serves. This one is different. Kaufman is where our address is, and we are going to be precise about what that address is, because the alternative is being caught being vague. Our address is a suite at 100 Kings Fort Parkway. That building is a multi-tenant retail strip on the highway side of town — there is a shipping store, a mobile carrier store, food. Our suite is a mailbox in it. It is not an office you can drop into, there is no reception desk, and we are not going to imply…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/kaufman-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Kaufman, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_kaufman_tx_c2", "text": "Kaufman is the county seat of Kaufman County, though not its largest city — Forney is. It covers about 9.22 square miles. The 2020 Census counted 6,797 residents inside the city limits, and estimates since put it in the mid-eight-thousands. What organizes the town commercially is where two highways meet. US-175 runs through the southwest side: about 33 miles northwest to Dallas, about 39 miles southeast to Athens. It is simultaneously the Dallas commute and the road to Cedar Creek Lake. TX-34 runs through the south and east: about 12 miles north to…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/kaufman-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Kaufman, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_kaufman_tx_c3", "text": "You have heard the number. Kaufman County is the fastest-growing county in Texas and the second-fastest in the United States , with more than 52,000 new residents since 2020 and a six percent jump between 2023 and 2024 alone, on Census Bureau data released in March 2025. The county went from about 145,000 people at the 2020 Census toward an estimated 209,000 by 2025. Now the part local marketing copy usually leaves out. Most of that growth is not in the city of Kaufman. It is in Forney and the western end of the county, closest to Dallas. The city of…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/kaufman-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Kaufman, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaufman,_Texas" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_areas", "targetId": "e_grp_areas", "targetName": "Mabank.net areas", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_athens_tx", "@type": "Place", "name": "Athens, Texas", "description": "The Henderson County seat is the most competitive search market we cover, and the only one where the word Texas is not optional", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_athens_tx_c1", "text": "Start with the problem nobody warns a local business about. Athens is one of the most ambiguous city names in the United States. Athens, Georgia is a university city of roughly a hundred thousand people. Athens, Greece is Athens, Greece. Between them they will eat every unmodified impression your town name could ever earn. The consequence is concrete and it is not a style preference. Every mention of the town should read \"Athens, Texas\" or \"Athens, TX\" — in the title, the headings, the address block, and in the structured data that tells a search engine…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/athens-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Athens, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_athens_tx_c2", "text": "Athens is the county seat of Henderson County, incorporated in 1856 and named for Athens, Greece. About 12,857 people lived here at the 2020 Census, with estimates since around 13,200 and growing a little under one percent a year. The population figure is not the point. Henderson County has around 82,150 residents and about two-thirds live in rural areas. Athens is the courthouse town, the hospital town and the college town for all of them. Deed research, the tax office, the district courts, the hospital, the community college: if you live anywhere in…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/athens-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Athens, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_athens_tx_c3", "text": "Athens is the only town in this part of our service area with genuinely distinct commercial layers, and they need unrelated things. Government and the courthouse bar The county courthouse and offices, the district and county courts, the jail and the tax office — plus the private practice that clusters around any Texas courthouse square: attorneys, title and abstract companies, surveyors, bail bondsmen. These need credibility, a contact route and accurate profiles. What they mostly do not need is content marketing. Healthcare UT Health Athens anchors a…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/athens-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Athens, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athens,_Texas" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_areas", "targetId": "e_grp_areas", "targetName": "Mabank.net areas", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_canton_tx", "@type": "Place", "name": "Canton, Texas", "description": "Canton runs on a four-day month, and a vendor website here is not a local search problem at all — the customers are not from Canton", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_canton_tx_c1", "text": "Canton is the county seat of Van Zandt County, where Texas highways 19 and 64 cross downtown, with I-20 running through the county just north. About 4,229 people lived here at the 2020 Census, with estimates since in the mid-four-thousands. On most days it is a quiet county-seat town with a courthouse, a square and a school district of roughly 2,250 students. Then, four days a month, it is not. First Monday Trade Days runs Thursday through Sunday before the first Monday of every month, year-round, rain or shine. Note the thing that trips up every…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/canton-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Canton, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_canton_tx_c2", "text": "Scale figures for First Monday vary wildly by source, so here is how we would handle them honestly. The market operator puts it at over 450 acres and more than 5,000 vendors , and the Canton Economic Development Corporation independently states \"over 450 acres.\" Wikipedia gives around 6,000 vendors and attendance up to 100,000 over a weekend in season. Older references still say 30 acres — decades out of date. The market is billed as the world's largest flea market ; that is a claim its operators make, not a verified ranking, and it should be attributed…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/canton-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Canton, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" }, { "chunkId": "e_canton_tx_c3", "text": "This is the fact that turns Canton from a curiosity into a specific web problem, and it is the reason a vendor's own website is worth building. What people call \"Canton\" or \"First Monday\" is a cluster of separately operated markets on separate grounds, each with its own management. The City of Canton lists, among others: the original First Monday Trade Days grounds, both open-air and enclosed; Old Mill Marketplace and The Mountain; The Village, with more than twelve acres of permanent shops; Canton Marketplace, climate-controlled with over three hundred…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/areas/canton-tx/", "pageTitle": "Web Design and Hosting in Canton, Texas", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "profile" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canton,_Texas" ], "relations": [ { "type": "PART_OF", "target": "e_grp_areas", "targetId": "e_grp_areas", "targetName": "Mabank.net areas", "confidence": "declared" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_getting_found_locally", "@type": "Concept", "name": "Getting Found Locally", "description": "The five channels that actually bring customers to a business around Cedar Creek Lake, what each one costs you, and which ones you can buy", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_getting_found_locally_c1", "text": "Somebody in Gun Barrel City needs a plumber at nine on a Saturday night. Somebody in Mabank wants a boat lift looked at before Memorial Day. Somebody who bought a weekend place on the east shore wants to know who cleans gutters. Around Cedar Creek Lake, they find you one of five ways, and every product ever sold to a local business is an attempt to influence one of them. The map results — the map and the short list of businesses that sits above everything else on a phone. The organic results — the ordinary blue links underneath. Facebook — specifically…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/getting-found-locally/", "pageTitle": "Getting Found Locally", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_getting_found_locally_c2", "text": "For anything a person needs nearby and needs soon, the map results dominate the screen. On a phone they can occupy the entire first view. Below them, further down, is the rest of the internet. Here is the part that surprises owners: the map results are not ranking your website. They are ranking a business record — the entity behind Google Maps — which you control through a Google Business Profile. Your website feeds that record and Google reads it, but the thing being sorted is the business, not the page. This is why a shop can sit in the map results…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/getting-found-locally/", "pageTitle": "Getting Found Locally", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_getting_found_locally_c3", "text": "The blue links are a separate result set, generated from a different index, and they behave differently in one way that matters enormously around this lake: they are far less tied to where the searcher is standing. That is the whole argument for having real pages. A second-home owner sitting in Dallas on a Wednesday, planning a Saturday, searching for a dock builder for Cedar Creek Lake, is fifty-odd miles from the water. Distance-driven map results will favor whoever is near them , not near the lake. But an ordinary web page about dock building on…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/getting-found-locally/", "pageTitle": "Getting Found Locally", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_search_engine_optimisation" ] }, { "entityId": "e_how_local_search_works", "@type": "Concept", "name": "How Local Search Works", "description": "Relevance, distance and prominence — Google's own three factors, how the map pack is put together, and why two people get different results", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_how_local_search_works_c1", "text": "Google publishes the answer itself, on a support page titled Tips to improve your local ranking on Google . Local results are based primarily on three things: Relevance — how well a Business Profile matches what somebody searched for. Distance — how far each business is from the person searching, or from the location named in the query. Prominence — how well known the business is, which Google says draws on information from across the web, including links, articles and directories, plus review count and review score. A wording note, because it comes up…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/how-local-search-works/", "pageTitle": "How Local Search Works", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_how_local_search_works_c2", "text": "This is the distinction that clears up most of the confusion, and almost nobody explains it before selling something. When you search for a service near you, Google can show two very different things on the same screen. The map results — a map with a short list of businesses, commonly three before a More places link — are drawn from Google's places index, the entity database behind Google Maps. The organic results below are drawn from the ordinary web index, the one full of pages. The thing being ranked is therefore different in each. In the map…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/how-local-search-works/", "pageTitle": "How Local Search Works", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_how_local_search_works_c3", "text": "Google does not publish a step-by-step description, so what follows is the mechanism as far as it can be established from Google's own documentation and observed behavior. Where it is inference, we say so. The query is interpreted — is this a search with local intent at all? Plumber, boat dock repair and breakfast are; a question about how a heat pump works is not, and no local pack appears. A location is established. Either the device's location, or the town named in the query, or an inferred location from network and history. A candidate set is drawn…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/how-local-search-works/", "pageTitle": "How Local Search Works", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization" ] }, { "entityId": "e_why_you_rank_in_one_town_not_another", "@type": "Concept", "name": "Why You Rank in One Town and Not the Next", "description": "The proximity problem, made concrete with Mabank, Gun Barrel City, Athens and Kaufman — and the honest list of what you can do about it", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_why_you_rank_in_one_town_not_another_c1", "text": "You rank in your own town and not the next one because Google computes distance from the person searching, or from the place named in the search, and not from your business. Your building does not move. The center point does. This is the hard limit of local search, and it is the thing most vendors will not say out loud, because saying it removes about half of what they were planning to sell you. No amount of money reliably beats distance in the map results. Not content, not links, not a monthly retainer, not schema markup, not a listing in two hundred…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/why-you-rank-in-one-town-not-another/", "pageTitle": "Why You Rank in One Town and Not the Next", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_why_you_rank_in_one_town_not_another_c2", "text": "Take a real shape: a plumbing company with one truck and one address in Mabank. Four people search the word plumber on the same afternoon. The searcher in Mabank. Standing more or less on top of you. The candidate set is centered here, there are not many plumbers in it, and a verified profile with the right category and a decent review count has a genuine chance of appearing. The searcher in Gun Barrel City , about nine road miles away down TX-198, the old Gun Barrel Lane. Close enough that you are plausibly in the candidate set, far enough that Gun…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/why-you-rank-in-one-town-not-another/", "pageTitle": "Why You Rank in One Town and Not the Next", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_why_you_rank_in_one_town_not_another_c3", "text": "Every one of these is pitched around this lake. Each has a documented consequence. Rent a mailbox or a virtual office in the town you want to rank in. This is the single most common piece of advice from bad vendors, and it is the fastest way to lose the listing you already have. Google's guidelines are explicit that post office boxes and mailboxes at remote locations are not eligible addresses, and that virtual offices do not qualify unless the business is genuinely staffed there during its stated hours. Co-working space qualifies only with clear…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/why-you-rank-in-one-town-not-another/", "pageTitle": "Why You Rank in One Town and Not the Next", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_google_business_profile_setup", "@type": "Concept", "name": "Setting Up a Google Business Profile", "description": "The setup that actually matters, in order — categories, address rules, hours, verification — and the things that get a profile suspended", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_google_business_profile_setup_c1", "text": "A Google Business Profile is the highest-return hour of work available to a small business around Cedar Creek Lake, and most of the value is in decisions made in the first ten minutes. The order matters because a mistake early is expensive to unwind. Create it under an account the business owns. Not your web guy's account, not your nephew's, not an agency's. Add other people as managers afterward. Decide what kind of business you are in Google's terms — storefront, service-area, or both. Set the primary category. This is the single biggest lever on the…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/google-business-profile-setup/", "pageTitle": "Setting Up a Google Business Profile", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_google_business_profile_setup_c2", "text": "Google's eligibility test is one sentence: a business qualifies if it either has a physical location that customers can visit, or travels to customers where they are. Read it carefully, because it excludes a real category of business — the purely online seller with no premises customers visit and no travel to customers does not qualify, and forcing a profile is how those businesses get permanently disabled. Three shapes are eligible, and the choice has consequences: Storefront. Customers come to you. The address is shown, and the hours you post are the…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/google-business-profile-setup/", "pageTitle": "Setting Up a Google Business Profile", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_google_business_profile_setup_c3", "text": "If you change one thing on an existing profile, change this. The primary category is the strongest relevance signal the profile carries, and it is a dropdown rather than a project. A business listed as General Contractor that should be Roofing Contractor is competing at a structural disadvantage against correctly categorized competitors, for free, forever, because of a menu choice made in five seconds three years ago. The ordering here — primary category first, everything else after — is practitioner consensus rather than a published Google statement…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/google-business-profile-setup/", "pageTitle": "Setting Up a Google Business Profile", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Maps" ] }, { "entityId": "e_reviews_and_citations", "@type": "Concept", "name": "Reviews, Citations and Getting Your Details Right", "description": "Citations are hygiene, not growth; reviews are the one free lever that works — and buying them has been a federal rule violation since October 2024", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_reviews_and_citations_c1", "text": "A citation is any mention of your business's name, address and phone number on another website, whether or not it links to you. There are two kinds. Structured citations are directory entries with defined fields — Yelp, the Better Business Bureau, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, your chamber of commerce. Unstructured citations are mentions in ordinary content: a story in the Monitor, a sponsor list, a supplier's dealer directory. Google supports the concept without using the word: its definition of prominence, one of the three published local…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/reviews-and-citations/", "pageTitle": "Reviews, Citations and Getting Your Details Right", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_reviews_and_citations_c2", "text": "We would rather show the working than assert a conclusion, because this is a subject where the industry states opinions as findings. The best available evidence is the Whitespark Local Search Ranking Factors report published on 6 November 2025 — forty-seven local search practitioners scoring 187 factors. It ranks the local pack factor groups roughly in this order: review signals first, then behavioral signals, then Business Profile signals, then citation signals , then on-page, links, personalization and social. Citations lost about half a percentage…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/reviews-and-citations/", "pageTitle": "Reviews, Citations and Getting Your Details Right", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_reviews_and_citations_c3", "text": "NAP stands for name, address and phone number, and consistency means the same legal name, address format and phone number everywhere. It matters because Google is resolving dozens of mentions to one business entity, and two spellings can produce two entities — and a duplicate is a documented suspension trigger. There is a trap here that is specific to this lake and it catches people through nobody's fault. Mabank is the USPS primary city for both ZIP 75147 and ZIP 75156, and Gun Barrel City is only an acceptable alternate on both. ZIP 75143 has Kemp as…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/reviews-and-citations/", "pageTitle": "Reviews, Citations and Getting Your Details Right", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_review" ] }, { "entityId": "e_ai_search_and_local_business", "@type": "Concept", "name": "AI Search and Your Local Business", "description": "What is documented, what is inferred, and what a business around Cedar Creek Lake should actually do differently — which may be very little", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_ai_search_and_local_business_c1", "text": "Google's own documentation says there is nothing special to do. Its guidance for AI features states, in writing: there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary. Its optimization guide goes further and names the products being sold to you that you do not need: you do not need to create machine-readable files, AI text files, markup or Markdown; there is no requirement to break content into tiny pieces for AI to understand it; you do not need to write in a specific way for generative…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/ai-search-and-local-business/", "pageTitle": "AI Search and Your Local Business", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_ai_search_and_local_business_c2", "text": "Three different products get bundled together under AI search and they behave differently. AI Overviews are the generated summary that sometimes appears at the top of a Google results page. Announced as Search Generative Experience at Google I/O in May 2023, rebranded and launched in the US as AI Overviews in May 2024 — a launch that produced the widely reported answers advising people to eat rocks and put glue on pizza, after which Google restricted the feature within weeks. AI Mode is a separate conversational search surface within Google, where the…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/ai-search-and-local-business/", "pageTitle": "AI Search and Your Local Business", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_ai_search_and_local_business_c3", "text": "Two mechanisms are documented and they are worth understanding because they are the only two with a real basis. Retrieval-augmented generation. The model does not know things about your business; it retrieves pages from the existing search index and reviews the information in them to generate a response. The consequence: if you are not indexed, you cannot be retrieved. Ordinary search work is upstream of AI visibility, and there is no separate door. Query fan-out. Google describes a set of concurrent related queries generated by the model to fetch…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/ai-search-and-local-business/", "pageTitle": "AI Search and Your Local Business", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Overviews" ] }, { "entityId": "e_running_your_site", "@type": "Concept", "name": "Running and Protecting Your Website", "description": "A website is four subscriptions, a pile of other people's software and a set of facts about you, and all of them decay on different clocks", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_running_your_site_c1", "text": "A website is not an object you buy once. It is four separate subscriptions, a pile of software written by other people, and a set of facts about your business, and every one of those decays on its own schedule. The domain expires on a date. The certificate that puts the padlock in the address bar expires on a much shorter date than it used to. The software underneath the site changes every week whether anyone is watching or not. And your hours, your phone number and your service area drift away from what the site says the moment anything changes in the…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/running-your-site/", "pageTitle": "Running and Protecting Your Website", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_running_your_site_c2", "text": "Everything that can go stale on a small business website runs on one of four clocks, and they tick at wildly different speeds. Knowing which clock a thing is on tells you how often to look at it. The domain, annually. The registration is a lease, not a purchase. It renews on an anniversary date, it is paid with a card that itself expires, and the notices go to whatever address was typed into the account years ago. A lapsed domain does not wait for you: it enters a redemption period, typically thirty days, during which only the original registrant can…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/running-your-site/", "pageTitle": "Running and Protecting Your Website", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_running_your_site_c3", "text": "The honest frequency order. Notice how far down the list the hosting company appears. The domain expired. Auto-renew off, the stored card expired, or notices went to an inbox nobody opens. The site does not go down so much as stop existing, and the email stops with it. The certificate expired. Visitors get a full-page browser warning most will not click through, while the site and its files sit there intact. An update broke something. A plugin or theme update collides with another and the site returns a white screen. This is the honest argument against…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/running-your-site/", "pageTitle": "Running and Protecting Your Website", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_website_security_basics", "@type": "Concept", "name": "Website Security for Small Businesses", "description": "Almost all of the real risk reduction available to a small site comes from four free things, and almost every paid product addresses what is left", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_website_security_basics_c1", "text": "Almost nobody chooses your business. Attacks against small websites are automated: a bot requests a predictable file, reads a plugin's version number out of it, checks that version against a list of disclosed vulnerabilities, and fires the matching exploit. No human ever looks at your site or decides you are worth the trouble. The reassurance that you are too small to be a target is exactly backwards - being small does not make you invisible, it makes you cheap. In rough order of how often we see them: One password, used in several places. The same…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/website-security-basics/", "pageTitle": "Website Security for Small Businesses", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_website_security_basics_c2", "text": "Verizon's Data Breach Investigations Report is the closest thing this field has to an independent annual dataset, and its 2026 edition reported a turning point: exploitation of vulnerabilities became the leading initial access route at 31 percent of breaches, ahead of stolen credentials for the first time in the report's history. It also found 48 percent of breaches involved a third party - and for a small business, that third party is your web designer, your host, or a plugin vendor. The vendor Patchstack reported 11,334 new vulnerabilities across the…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/website-security-basics/", "pageTitle": "Website Security for Small Businesses", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_website_security_basics_c3", "text": "If you do one thing after reading this page, do this one. Turn on multi-factor authentication where your domain is registered, and at your host, before you turn it on anywhere else. The reasoning is a chain that runs one direction. Whoever controls the domain controls where your email is delivered, and whoever controls your email can trigger a password reset on essentially every other account the business owns, because a password reset is an email. The domain therefore sits above the website, the host, the social accounts and the bank alerts. The…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/website-security-basics/", "pageTitle": "Website Security for Small Businesses", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_security" ] }, { "entityId": "e_email_that_reaches_the_inbox", "@type": "Concept", "name": "Business Email That Reaches the Inbox", "description": "Misconfigured email authentication does not announce itself with an error message; it announces itself as customers who never answered your invoice", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_email_that_reaches_the_inbox_c1", "text": "A contractor sends invoices at the end of the month from an address at their own domain. Some are paid. Several are not, and those customers are not avoiding the bill: they never received it. The message was accepted and filed straight into spam, or rejected and bounced to a mailbox nobody reads. Weeks later, chasing the money, the contractor finds a pattern. Nothing in that sequence produced an error message. Email authentication does not fail loudly. It fails as customers who did not respond, quotes that went nowhere, and a slow suspicion that…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/email-that-reaches-the-inbox/", "pageTitle": "Business Email That Reaches the Inbox", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_email_that_reaches_the_inbox_c2", "text": "SPF stands for Sender Policy Framework, specified in RFC 7208. It is a single text record published in your domain's DNS listing the servers permitted to send mail for your domain. A receiving server looks it up and asks: did this message arrive from a machine on the list? Two details cause most of the real trouble. First, SPF checks the envelope sender, not the From line the human reads . Email carries two sender addresses - the one used during delivery and the one shown in the mail program - and SPF checks the delivery one. That gap is exactly why SPF…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/email-that-reaches-the-inbox/", "pageTitle": "Business Email That Reaches the Inbox", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_email_that_reaches_the_inbox_c3", "text": "DKIM stands for DomainKeys Identified Mail, specified in RFC 6376. Where SPF is a list of addresses, DKIM is a cryptographic signature. Your sending provider holds a private key and signs each outgoing message with it; the matching public key is published in your DNS under a name combining a selector chosen by the provider with your domain. The receiving server fetches that key and verifies the signature. What a valid signature proves is narrow but useful: the message really was signed by something holding the key for that domain, and the signed parts…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/email-that-reaches-the-inbox/", "pageTitle": "Business Email That Reaches the Inbox", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_authentication" ] }, { "entityId": "e_when_your_website_goes_down", "@type": "Concept", "name": "What to Do When Your Website Goes Down", "description": "Most of an outage is spent finding out who to call, and that part is entirely preventable with ten minutes of preparation", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_when_your_website_goes_down_c1", "text": "Before anything else, establish that the problem is real. A surprising share of the site is down turns out to be local and self-clearing: a cached DNS answer on your own computer, a browser extension, an office network, or your internet provider having a bad afternoon. Three checks, in about ninety seconds: Load the site on your phone with wifi turned off. That puts you on a different network with different DNS resolvers. If it loads there, the site is up and the problem is on your end. Try a third-party checker that loads the site from somewhere else.…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/when-your-website-goes-down/", "pageTitle": "What to Do When Your Website Goes Down", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_when_your_website_goes_down_c2", "text": "The precise wording tells you which of four separate companies owns the problem, and calling the wrong one costs a day. Copy the message exactly, including any code in capital letters, before you touch anything. This site cannot be reached, or the address not being found. The domain is not resolving - a domain or DNS problem, belonging to your registrar . The web server is probably fine. Your connection is not private, or a certificate date warning. The certificate expired or does not match. Your host . The site and its files are untouched. A 500 error…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/when-your-website-goes-down/", "pageTitle": "What to Do When Your Website Goes Down", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_when_your_website_goes_down_c3", "text": "Four independent layers have to work in sequence for a visitor to see your homepage. Knowing which one failed is most of the diagnosis. The domain registration is the lease on the name. It renews annually, and if it lapses everything above it stops. Its status is machine-readable: since ICANN retired the old public lookup system on 28 January 2025, the definitive source is RDAP, the Registration Data Access Protocol, and every registrar offers a lookup. Check the expiry date and the status codes. A status of clientHold, serverHold, redemptionPeriod…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/when-your-website-goes-down/", "pageTitle": "What to Do When Your Website Goes Down", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downtime" ] }, { "entityId": "e_reading_your_analytics", "@type": "Concept", "name": "Reading Your Website Analytics", "description": "At forty visits a month you should be reading months rather than days, because everything shorter than that is noise wearing a percentage sign", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_reading_your_analytics_c1", "text": "Most small businesses have two measurement tools and assume they are two versions of the same thing. They are not, and that confusion causes more wasted argument than anything else in this subject. Google Search Console tells you what Google did with you. It reports on your presence in search results: how often you appeared, how often somebody clicked, what they typed, which pages Google has indexed, and whether anything is wrong from Google's point of view. It is a report about the search engine. Google Analytics tells you what people did once they…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/reading-your-analytics/", "pageTitle": "Reading Your Website Analytics", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_reading_your_analytics_c2", "text": "The gap between the two is usually presented to a business owner as evidence that somebody made an error. It is not. Here is the actual mechanism, in seven parts. Different populations. Search Console counts clicks on Google search results. Analytics counts page views where the tracking code ran. Neither is a subset of the other. Lost tags. Ad blockers, privacy browsers, refused consent banners, people who leave before the page finishes loading, and ordinary script errors all remove hits from analytics. They do not remove clicks from Search Console.…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/reading-your-analytics/", "pageTitle": "Reading Your Website Analytics", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_reading_your_analytics_c3", "text": "This is the case for logging into Search Console rather than only looking at visit counts. Impressions. How often you appeared at all, whether or not anyone clicked - the only free source of demand data about your own business. If you appeared nine hundred times and were clicked twelve times, the problem is your title and your reviews, not your position. The actual words people typed. Analytics has not shown search terms for well over a decade. Search Console is where those words live, and for a local business they are frequently surprising: people…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/reading-your-analytics/", "pageTitle": "Reading Your Website Analytics", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_analytics" ] }, { "entityId": "e_getting_online", "@type": "Concept", "name": "Getting Your Business Online", "description": "A plain account of what a Mabank-area business actually needs online, in what order, and which of the usual pieces you can safely leave out", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_getting_online_c1", "text": "A small business around Cedar Creek Lake needs four things to exist online, and they are worth buying in this order: A domain name registered in the business's own name. This is the address customers type and the thing every other piece hangs from. It is also the only piece that is genuinely hard to replace later. A place to publish. Hosting, a builder platform, or one static page on a server somebody maintains. It is a commodity, replaceable in an afternoon. A Google Business Profile. For a plumber in Payne Springs or a boutique on TX-334, this is…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/getting-online/", "pageTitle": "Getting Your Business Online", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_getting_online_c2", "text": "The domain is a lease, not a purchase. You pay an ICANN-accredited registrar, and the registrar writes your name into the registry that operates the ending — Verisign for .com and .net , Public Interest Registry for .org . The lease runs one to ten years and renews. The registry also stores your nameserver delegation, which is what points the name at a server. Hosting is a computer that answers when a browser asks for your address. On shared hosting that computer runs dozens or hundreds of other sites at once, each with a directory on the same…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/getting-online/", "pageTitle": "Getting Your Business Online", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_getting_online_c3", "text": "The usual sequence is: somebody offers to build a website, the domain gets registered in whichever account was open at the time, hosting gets bundled in, and the profile that actually produces the phone calls is set up last, by an employee, on a personal Gmail account. Two years later the business owns none of it. The correct sequence costs nothing extra: Register the domain yourself, first, in the legal name of the business , in an account whose password you personally hold, with two-factor authentication on your own phone. Whoever builds the site gets…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/getting-online/", "pageTitle": "Getting Your Business Online", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_what_a_small_business_website_needs", "@type": "Concept", "name": "What a Small Business Website Actually Needs", "description": "Six facts, arranged so a customer on a phone can act on them in seconds, and a straight argument against the thirty-page website", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_what_a_small_business_website_needs_c1", "text": "A small business website has to answer six things, and a customer must be able to reach all six from the top of a phone screen: who you are , what you do, in the words your customers use , where you are or which towns you serve , when you are open , a phone number that dials when it is tapped , and some proof that you are a real business run by real people . That is the inventory. Everything past it — a blog, a gallery, a team page, a booking system, a store, a newsletter, a chat widget — is optional, and should be justified individually…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/what-a-small-business-website-needs/", "pageTitle": "What a Small Business Website Actually Needs", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_what_a_small_business_website_needs_c2", "text": "The single most valuable element on a local business site is a telephone number written as an actual telephone link, high on the page, on every page. Not in the footer. Not only on a contact page. The mechanism is worth understanding because it explains a failure that looks like nothing. A number typed as ordinary text is sometimes auto-linked by a mobile browser and sometimes not, and the auto-linking becomes unreliable once the number sits inside a styled heading, a graphic, or an element the theme treats as decoration. An explicit telephone link…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/what-a-small-business-website-needs/", "pageTitle": "What a Small Business Website Actually Needs", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_what_a_small_business_website_needs_c3", "text": "Hours are the most-searched fact about a local business, and they are the fact most often published in a form nothing can read. In a photo or a PDF, your hours cannot be indexed, cannot be copied into a calendar, cannot be read by assistive technology, and cannot be picked up by anything that summarizes businesses for a user. The address has the same problem, plus one more: an address the visitor cannot select is an address they cannot paste into a maps application. The practical rules are dull and they matter: Hours as text, including the exception…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/what-a-small-business-website-needs/", "pageTitle": "What a Small Business Website Actually Needs", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Website" ] }, { "entityId": "e_what_a_website_costs", "@type": "Concept", "name": "What a Small Business Website Really Costs", "description": "How website pricing is actually built, which recurring costs surprise people in year two, and how to read a quote before you sign it", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_what_a_website_costs_c1", "text": "A website price is not a market rate. It is a number of hours of skilled labor multiplied by a rate, plus a small recurring bill for the things that renew. That is the whole structure, and it is why two quotes for the same site can be far apart without either one being dishonest. So the single most useful thing you can do with any quote is ask for it to be expressed as hours, a rate, and a list of what is included . A quote that can be broken down that way can be compared, negotiated and understood. A quote that cannot be broken down that way is a…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/what-a-website-costs/", "pageTitle": "What a Small Business Website Really Costs", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_what_a_website_costs_c2", "text": "In rough order of how much each one moves the total: How much of the content does not exist yet. Copywriting and photography are the most underestimated line items in this business and the most common reason a project stalls for months. Somebody has to interview the owner, learn the trade's vocabulary, and write. If you supply finished text and usable photographs, you have removed the largest variable. If you assume the designer is writing and the designer assumes you are, the project stops. How many decisions have not been made. Revision rounds are…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/what-a-website-costs/", "pageTitle": "What a Small Business Website Really Costs", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_what_a_website_costs_c3", "text": "Year one gets budgeted. Year two is where businesses get surprised. The recurring floor for a small site is genuinely small and it is knowable, but it is never zero: Domain renewal. Registration is a lease. It renews annually unless you register several years ahead. A free domain bundled with hosting is free for one year and priced by the host after that. Missing a renewal is far more expensive than paying one: after expiry the name enters a thirty-day redemption period, during which only the original registrant can restore it and the restore fee is…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/what-a-website-costs/", "pageTitle": "What a Small Business Website Really Costs", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" } ] }, { "entityId": "e_choosing_a_domain_name", "@type": "Concept", "name": "How to Choose a Domain Name", "description": "How to pick a name that survives being read aloud over the phone, and how to check it for trademark conflicts before you spend anything", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_choosing_a_domain_name_c1", "text": "The test that matters is not how the name looks in a proposal. It is whether somebody can say it once over the phone, in a noisy shop, and have the other person type it correctly on the first try. That single criterion eliminates most bad domain names before any other consideration. Everything else follows from it: Short beats long. Fewer characters means fewer chances to mistype. Your business name beats a keyword phrase , because your business name is what people will remember and what they will be told by the neighbor who recommended you. Take the…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/choosing-a-domain-name/", "pageTitle": "How to Choose a Domain Name", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_choosing_a_domain_name_c2", "text": "The technical structure behind an ending is worth ten seconds of your time, because it explains who is responsible for what. A registry operates the ending and holds the authoritative database — Verisign runs .com and .net , Public Interest Registry runs .org . A registrar is accredited by ICANN, contracts with the registry, and sells to the public. A reseller sells under somebody else's accreditation, which is what most web hosts and web designers actually are. Your registrar of record is the accreditation holder, not the reseller, and that…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/choosing-a-domain-name/", "pageTitle": "How to Choose a Domain Name", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_choosing_a_domain_name_c3", "text": "This is where most of the folklore lives, so it is worth being precise about what is documented and what is repeated. On endings, Google has stated its position directly. Its guidance on new top-level domains says its systems treat new endings like any other, and that keywords in a top-level domain give no advantage or disadvantage in search ( Google Search Central ). So a name ending in a keyword buys nothing on that axis. On keywords in the name itself, the honest summary is that exact-match keyword domains are not the ranking lever they were in the…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/choosing-a-domain-name/", "pageTitle": "How to Choose a Domain Name", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" } ], "sameAs": [ "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_name" ] }, { "entityId": "e_who_owns_your_website", "@type": "Concept", "name": "Who Owns Your Website and Domain Name", "description": "The registrant is the owner, not the payer: what that means in practice, and what to put in writing before any work starts", "hasChunks": [ { "chunkId": "e_who_owns_your_website_c1", "text": "ICANN's Transfer Policy is explicit that the Administrative Contact and the Registered Name Holder are the only parties with authority to approve or deny a transfer, and that where they disagree, the Registered Name Holder's authority prevails . That single field is the mechanism of every hostage situation we are called about: the designer put their own name in it during onboarding, the registrar's contract runs to them, and paying every invoice never made you the registrant. So the first question is not what your contract says. It is what the…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/who-owns-your-website/", "pageTitle": "Who Owns Your Website and Domain Name", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_who_owns_your_website_c2", "text": "Ownership disputes get muddled because the word website covers three assets with three different owners, three bodies of law and three recovery routes. Separate them first. 1. The domain name. A lease from a registry through an ICANN-accredited registrar, governed by ICANN policy and, in a dispute, by United States trademark and property law. Almost always yours in substance. 2. The files and the database. Design, code, photographs and text, governed by copyright — where owners are most often wrong about what they bought. 3. The accounts. Hosting…", "sourceUrl": "https://www.mabank.net/guides/who-owns-your-website/", "pageTitle": "Who Owns Your Website and Domain Name", "publisher": "Mabank.net", "contentType": "guide" }, { "chunkId": "e_who_owns_your_website_c3", "text": "The authorization code — historically the AuthInfo or EPP code, being renamed the Transfer Authorization Code as ICANN's rules are updated — is a registrar-generated secret, unique to one domain, proving to a gaining registrar that whoever holds it may move the name. Four provisions of the Transfer Policy are worth knowing precisely, because they are what a stalling registrar hopes you have not read ( ICANN Transfer Policy ): Codes must be unique per domain. 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