You might have the spiffiest new website on the block, but if nobody knows about it, it won't do you any good.

We've all used search engines only to find millions of sites that match our query. How does a site get one of those coveted, page 1 listings? The answer is, it requires sustained, smart work, and maybe a little help from your advertising budget and your friends.

Advertising on the web can be bought in the form of text ads, image ads, even video ads. How much it costs to place those ads will depend on several factors, including how many other websites are jostling for the same keywords as you.

Two prominent types of online advertising are search engine listings and web host directory listings.

Search Engine Listing is very competitive, as any popular keywords will have plenty of sites competing for top ranking for those keywords. Bumping your site up in search engines requires consistent effort, and a good reputation. Rankings of search engine listings are based on a number of factors, such as how many other sites link to yours.

You can buy ads on top search engine listing pages. The cost of such ads will depend on how much competition there is for your ad keywords. For example, it will cost more to advertise your site that sells women's clothing than it would to advertise your site that sells waxed bookbinding twine. With any popular category like apparel, you will automatically be competing with long established sites like Victoria's Secret and Anthropologie, but you could well be the sole seller of bookbinding twine in your hemisphere.

Costs for paid search engine ads will depend on how prominently you want your site ad to be displayed. You may pay for a certain amount of time for the ad to run, or you may pay by the click, which means you will be charged a little bit of money whenever a user clicks on your ad.

Web Hosting Directory Advertising is a low-cost way to bring users to your site. Check if your web host offers regular submission to search engines and directories. You may have to pay for this service, but getting your site in all the top search engines and directories will help build quality traffic. Different directories and search engines have different rules for submissions, and your web host provider should be able to tell you how you can make your site more prominent on the web.

Cost-Per-Click Advertising, as mentioned above, means that you pay each time a potential customer clicks on your ad. This may not reach the masses you want to right away, but chances are, if someone clicks on your ad, it is because he or she is really interested in what you have to offer. With Google Adwords, ads are matched to website advertising space based on keywords and relevance.

Web Hosting Forum Advertising allows web hosts to indirectly advertise on hosting forum websites. They sometimes also sell paid text link and banner ads fairly inexpensively. Forums often have strict rules about not linking to external sites in your posts, so be sure to read up first.

You can also drive some traffic to your site with your social networking friends. If you host a personal blog, you can post a link and tell your readers about your site. Just be sure that the person in charge of your business is OK with that. Friends can be quite reliable for checking out what's going on with their contacts, and who knows? You might get some business out of it.

In conclusion, there is no one “best” way to advertise on the Internet. Most likely, the successful ad campaign will have elements of cost-per-click advertising, paid ads, organically increasing exposure on search engines, and even including a link to your site as part of your email signature. Every little bit helps with an advertising platform as vast as the World Wide Web.

Your advertising strategy needs to be flexible, especially at first, until you find out where your traffic is coming from. Many web hosts offer detailed statistics on the traffic to your site that will help you figure out which ads are the most successful. Start out with a broad and flexible plan, put in the time and effort to get word out about your site, and use whatever analysis tools you can to learn which ads work and which don't. While web advertising may never be as targeted as newspaper or magazine advertising, print advertising will never have the potential to reach as many customers as web advertising.