We, the webmasters and bloggers, want to be present in the internet and especially in the Social Media. We want our work that takes many hours from our valuable lifetime to be appreciated by the community out there. But there is one little problem: In an infinite number of possible channels where should I focus on to receive the maximum response for a moderate size of effort?

1&1 takes the next step towards a Universal Search. The SERPs of the German portal searches for the brands WEB.DE, GMX.net and 1&1 now contain shopping results for relevant search requests. These results are displayed prominently on the SERPs.

Until today the world of SEO success factors has been quite straightforward: On the one hand there is onsite optimization that concerns everything that can be done directly on a website and on the other hand you can see the offsite optimization that refers to building and fostering lots of good links. But this simple view is no longer appropriate: brands are becoming more and more important, social media are on their way and the Author Rank is showing its presence at many places.

SEOs’ sphere of activity has therefore broadened and changed. What factors will be important in the future and how do they depend on each other? I have created an infographic to visualize this.

With its Project Glass, Google is going to change search habits in the future. Search will be everywhere and every time. Search will be part of an augmented reality where entities like persons or things will be semantically connected by an all-knowing search engine and social network. Does this sound like Science-Fiction? Maybe this is nearer than many may think. And the challenges for SEOs will be at least as huge as the changes in search habits.

As a further step towards Social SERPs Google introduces the new "+1" button. It is a commitment to social factors in search. In the future Google will display a little button labeled "+1" next to search hits. By clicking this button users can show Google that they "like" a certain search hit. In its official blog Google tells that the clicks on the button will influence the order in which the search hits are displayed. The button will be shown next to both organic and sponsored search hits. Search hits that have been "+1d" by users that Google knows as your friends will be ranked higher, but also clicks by other users that you do not know will have an effect.

After existing for almost one year it is time for SEO Suedwest to introduce a new service. Because most of the relevant information concerning SEO can be found in English language and most of the readers understand rather English than German, I have created a new English SEO blog.

Google has just announced a new function to block unwanted sites in SERPs. With this function all hits of blocked domains by a user will be filtered out of the user's future SERPs. The blocked domains can be administrated via personal search settings. If there are filtered hits in the SERP an according information is shown.