Cyber Monday - the first Monday after Thanksgiving, starts the holiday season online sales rush. For online retailers and business website owners, it’s the “make or break” sales time of the e-commerce year.

So with only a week left until Cyber Monday - what search engine marketing options do website owners have to maximize their traffic at this vital time?

Rapid results are the key at this late stage. While ongoing SEO and rank building should continue, it’s time to crack out the sponsored advertising, local listings and featured ads - there’s no time to waste.

Here are three primary traffic sources to focus on for Cyber Monday:

1. Paid Advertising on Google and Yahoo!
Nothing beats a strong paid advertising campaign through the holiday season. With Google and Yahoo! carrying the majority of the search traffic, I recommend focusing your attention on these two search engines.

Paid advertising is vital for online retailers during Cyber Monday and through until the end of the sales season because:

• Your search ads are live almost instantly
• They provide extremely targeted exposure
• You can feature at the top of the search result with no delay
• There are tight controls around costs and ROI to maximize your profitability

2. Local Listings for Local Search
Cyber Monday ties in closely with Black Friday (the Friday after Thanksgiving) - which is the offline world’s busiest sales day leading into the holiday season. Changing consumer shopping behavior means that more people are using online to help streamline their offline shopping.

This is where Local Search becomes critical for “bricks and mortar” retailers. The vast array of local search services are a vital source of in-store traffic as consumers turn to search engines to find their closest shops and retailers.

All the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN are now including “local” results in their standard web results - making it even more important to ensure your business has an enhanced local listing.

Local listings provide the following added benefits during the holiday season sales rush:

• Listings can be live and ranking strongly quicker than normal results
• Enhanced local listings provide more information to prospective shoppers
• You can include special offers and holiday season discounts in your listing
• Listings can be updated at required to ensure they are always up to date

3. Featured Ad Listings on Other Search Engines
While the bulk of the holiday season search traffic will be on Google and Yahoo!, there are some other smaller search engines that can provide cost effective ways to get valuable visitors during the holiday season rush. Our Top-Up Traffic service for example taps into the ISEDN network which includes guaranteed exposure across 250+ search engines.

The benefits of featured listings on these smaller search services include:

• Fast listing! Top Up Traffic can have your website listing live in 8 hours
• Keyword specific exposure for quality visitors
• NO Click Fees - means unlimited traffic for your monthly spend

Time is of the essence with Cyber Monday looming… so if you haven’t started revving up your search engine marketing, now’s the time to get serious!