If you’re a regular visitor to TheBitBot.Com (you’re probably not, but that’s OK…LOL!), you may have noticed that 2012 brought major changes to the scope and focus on this site.

In the past, this site was built around teaching the fundamentals of search engine optimization and search engine marketing.

While those subjects are indeed interesting, writing about them because somewhat boring and repetitive in my humble opinion.

Additionally, search engine algorithm changes, although interesting and very newsworthy to say the least, simply don’t hold my interest.

I believe that the best SEO is, and always has been, understanding what triggers psychological responses in the minds of real people.

For this reason, we re-re-tooled TheBitBot.Com into more of a news-media outlet.

Our goal, of course, is to eventually be listed in Google News as a news source, but we have a long way to go.

One really important change with the site is the fact that it is no longer confined to material and articles pertaining to SEO and marketing.

There are simply too many other interesting subjects to write about.

At any given moment, while browsing the news, I may feel the inspiration to write an editorial about a subject that is important to me and that is competely unrelated to SEO.

With our expanded categories, this is now possible.

With that long lead-in let me now go on a little rant.

As I was browing Google News this morning (I always check the science section first), I found myself closing poorly scripted popups, drop downs, slideups, etc, etc, on what I consider to be major outfits, such as National Geographic and TGDaily.

Were they annoying? Yes, they were very annoying. Additionally, they looked horrible.

Some could not be closed and covered content, other darkened the screen and I had to stop reading and scroll up to close it, and still others took so long to load, that I was forced to wait for a video to start loading to even be able to stop it.

Additionally, I didn’t look at any of them. I closed them all at the first opportunity.

For these reasons, if you decide to use popups, slideups, pop-overs or any other advertising or information collecting “tricks”, at least do the following:

1) Make sure that whatever popup or slide up you use functions optimally across the following: Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Microsoft Internet Explorer.

It would be a shame to annoy your visitors with a form or ad that can’t even serve its purpose because of browser incompatibilities.

2) Put a delay on it. I have a popup on TheBitBot.Com, and it drops down on every page, BUT, there is a 180-300 second delay before it appears.

You have to let your visitors get comfortable with the site which means optimized functionality and minimized disturbance.

Sure, this means that most people will not see it, but those interested enough to hang around that long will and those are the individuals I am interested in.

Additionally, the same for is available in the sidebar and at the bottom of each article.

3) Don’t sitck a video in it. Most people’s attention span is little more than a few seconds long, unless they are really interested in it and NOBODY hangs around to watch a video that they never clicked on in the first place.

Remember, a webmaster should first and foremost consider the quality of the experience that their visitors have when visiting their site.

The site should load quickly, appear normal across all browsers, have intuitive functionality and use popups, slideups and drop downs sparingly so as to maximize visitor experience.

If you are interested in checking out a popup for your site, then we recommend the following: Popup Domination

Mark Thomas

Mark is the Administrator of TheBitBot.Com News Articles For Ezines and Chief Editor of the TBB SEO Newsletter. Writes. Scripts. Hacks. Cracks. Re-Writes. Mods. Practices SEO of ALL shades. Has Some “VERY SMART” Friends Boldly Experiments. Publishes. Moderates. Trains. Explains. Pursues Three Important Careers Simultaneously. If you are interested in submitting a guest post with us then simply [ click here ] and sign up for a free account. Then simply submit your guest post there.