For the past 2 years I’ve created lists of websites that every SEO should either know or use the following year. You can find my previous lists here for 2010 and 2009 but for 2011 please look through the resources below:

1. Google Webmaster Central on YouTube – Google and more importantly Matt Cutt’s help answer questions focused around search which helps clear up a lot hearsay and new developments.
2. Twitter – If you don’t know what Twitter is please venture out of your cave at least once and give it a try. More important know it’s been confirmed social signals contribute to organic search rankings. Very useful for finding business contacts and having SEO news delivered to your screen (depending who you follow obviously).
3. SEO Dojo Training – I’ve been a long term fan of Dave Harry and his blog, SEO Dojo training is a great commnity and I massivly suggest you join in. Lot’s of testing, sharing and training for even the most experienced SEO’s.
4. SEOMoz – Great SEO blog and community for beginers up to experienced SEO’s. Rand Fishkin has done a great job of cementing himself in the industry, new developments and discoveries are often discussed with data to backup theories.
5. Open Site Exporer – Essential link analysis tool for all SEO’s. Find out where your competitors get their links from and discover the value of each link.
6. SEOBook – Essential reading on a regular basis for any SEO and some of the free downloadable tools are great to use.
7. Yammer – Knowledge share will be as important as ever, Yammer lets you create mini communities like Twitter to help share news/links and updates – great for agencies and internal departments that might want to keep persnoal and business life separate!
8. Search Engine Land – A hub of all activity search related, of course you can use Sphinn too which is their sister site which still delivers great SEO articles.
9. Google Insights – If you want to know trends of particular search phrases or websites this is a great place to find free data. Take the results with a pinch of salt but generally Google’s providing good insights here plus if you’re stuck for keyword ideas there’s some relevant suggestions.
10. SEOUnique – An SEO blog written by me that you are reading now (and hopefully you’re enjoying) meant for beginners and those interested in a few SEO theories and tests. 
11. Search Engine Roundtable – Another blog/community website which I’ve been using for years, often very quick to announce new SEO developments so definitly one for the RSS.
12. Majestic SEO – Another link analysis tool and a rather good one too. It’s been around for a while and although sometimes the links aren’t updated frequently enough it has a great admin area and reporting layout.
13. Hitwise – More important for the advanced SEO’s out there, Hitwise provides industry insights at an incredibly granular level. Costs and absolute fortune but they do release bits of free information and data through their blog, well worth bookmarking.
14. LinkedIn - Really important business social site, think of it as a place to map out your career path and past work experiences. A lot of headhunters for agencies and client side jobs in SEO, not only that but you can take part in group discussions and help answer questions which help increase your business profile.
15. Search Engine People – I’ve been a big fan of this blog for many years and can tell you Jeff Quipp is an extremely interesting SEO and blogger. Great search blog posts can be found here!

I’m sure there are many other sites that SEO’s should know for 2011, if you have any suggestions please let me know and I’ll build up a bigger list.

There has been a recent increase in discussion regarding the value of exact match domains. This has primarily been stirred up as Matt Cutt’s was recently referenced at Pubcon as saying Google was looking into the value of exact match domains. For those of you not aware of this technique for a long time now Google has given a heavy increase in weighting to domains that exact match for specific keywords. This method of optimisation is only ever successfull targeting a certain type of keyword, usually medium to low levels of search volume is where it works best.

I for one have used this method for a while and for the last few months have noticed some odd activity on 2 of my extact match websites.

Setting the Scene:

The two websites in question  target keywords that have an average search volume of 2,000 per month so with some well placed on-site optimisation and very little link building they can rank at number 1 for their targets, until a few months back they did this well. Then one day they both dropped out of the search results for the keywords in the domain name, and just these not the additional long tailed keywords that were driving other traffic. You can se an example of this for site 1 below:

 I did no paid links what so ever so I knew this was not a penalty given by Google but had a really hard time finding out what the problem was. Based on experience I often find if you’ve done nothing wrong and there’s no obvious errors then Google should sort it out. Last week I saw site 1 ranking number 1 again for the exact match keyword almost like someone had just switched it back on.

Now if this had just happened for 1 website I would probably just put it down to a “one off”, however as you can see below site 2 also had a sharp drop from just 1 keyword (the same as the domain name) and no longer ranked at all, whereas it had ranked in the top 3.

You can see the initial drop in the first box and then in the second box you can see that for a short period it went back up to the original position. Again this site had no paid links or black hat SEO, so what’s the deal?

There’s a good post on SEOBook about whether or not you should buy exact match domains, I for one think that these kind of sites usually never compete on the scale of actual big brands but can provide useful information for niche subjects, I’ll be interested to see if this activity is a test or not.