I’ve been looking around the internet for way to make sure my blog is listed when people are searching for it (or for related topics). Since I’m pretty new to blogging I wanted to make sure there was not some sort of obvious thing I was missing. I already was using FeedBurner and a couple of pinging services so when I update the various search engines get notified. While I was in this process I stumbled across the idea of traffic exchanges sites. For those of you not familiar with them basically they work like this: I visit your website and in exchange you visit mine.

The idea seams a little like speeding. Everyone seems to be doing it, but that doesn’t necessarily make it right. It seems a little like I’m whoring out my blog to whoever will look at it just to boost the number of hits I’m getting. However, just because traffic exchange sites increase the quantity of hits to my blog they don’t necessarily increase the quality hits my blog gets.

As I was looking at the various traffic exchange sites I noticed that some of them offer “targeted traffic exchanges.” These allow you to surf only sites you’re interested in the effort to help not only increase the quantity of hits, but do so with people are interested in what you’re site is about. Hopefully this would allow for an increase in quality hits. So, it is still speeding but only to the extent that I’m following the flow of traffic. This sounds a lot better to me. It put my web site in front of people interested in the topics I post about, and I only have to surf sites that I’m interested in.

So, I narrowed my search for traffic exchange sites to ones that allow for target surfing. I checked out each of the following sites and found the best to be BlogMad.net. It offers the best ration of surfing to visits with targeted traffic.

Here is what a brief review of each service I tried out.
BlogMad.net
They allow for surfing of by category. It is not specifically a targeted exchange because by default every category of site is turned on to surf, but users can go in and edit the categories they want to surf. Most of the sites I surfed were personal blogs. Not a lot of them were in the same category as mine, but there were a few cools ones. They have a 1:1 ratio for surfing. For every site I visit one person will visit my site. Their website is one of the nicer ones that I found and the return visits come in pretty quickly after I surf.

BlogAzoo.com
This was not my least favorite exchange sites but it was not that great either. It does not show you very clearly how many sites you’ve surfed. Also, the only have a 2:1 surfing ratio so for every 2 sites I visit one person will visit my site. They do give you bonus credits at after surfing 25 sites, but not enough to get the ration anywhere near 1:1. Their site is not the best I’ve seen, but it is not the worst either. The return visits come in about an average speed. Not right away like some, but not as slow as others. All around an average traffic exchange site.

BlogSoldiers.com
This site is very busy. Once you login all of the options are listed on buttons on the middle of the page. There is no easy button to see your stats, but it is very easy to get started surfing quickly. My first complaint about this site is that the return visits take quite a while to come in. If I surf 25 sites today through BlogSoldiers it might take 2 or 3 days to get 25 visitors back to my site. My guess is this is because they don’t have a lot of users. My other complaint is that their return visitor ratio is only 4:3. So for every 4 I visit I only get 3 visitors back. If you don’t mind the return visits trickling in this site is ok, but nothing special.

BlogExplosion.com
After signing up over a week ago my blog is still pending Admin approval. I’m loosing hope that it will ever happen. If it does the site has potential. It is nicely laid out, but the ratio of site surfing to visitors is only 2:1. They do have some options for users to specify what category of blogs they want to surf and what categories they don’t want to surf so it is somewhat targeted, but it looks like you can only specify one category for each of these options. So, while it might be a good site it doesn’t seem to be worth the effort given that other sites have better surf to visitor ratios.

BlogAdvance.com
This site is one of the better ones I’ve seen. The surfing to visitor ratio is 1:1, but the return visits come in very slowly. Again, if you don’t mind the slow return visits then this is not a bad deal. My only real annoyance is that BlogAdvance resizes the browser window, for some unknown reason, with each site load. I prefer my browser to be maximized, but each site drops it down to a smaller size. Also, I don’t see any way to do targeted surfing, but with a good ration it is still a pretty decent site.

I also tried out some Traffic Exchanges sites that were not Blog specific but are targeted. TrafficG was the first one I tried and it is probably my favorite. They start out with a 1:1 ration and the return visits happen within minutes. Over time, by surfing sites, you can get up to a 10:11 ration. So, for every 10 sites you surf you get 11 unique visitors back. The only thing that bugged me about this one was that a lot of sites seemed to be miscategorized. So, the sites were not all ones I was interested in but most of them were ok.

Overall, I’m not sure that any of these are worth the effort in getting quality traffic, but if you have a little extra time and don’t mind surfing random sites you can easily get a lot of hits to your site or blog.