Rarely do I give a colleague praise so publicly, yet Dan Thies deserves it. His efforts are unmatched in the area of keyword research and targeting, an often under-appreciated specialty in the SEO business.

Recently, Dan has started a public blog at Sitepoint, delving into some of the advanced methodology he uses to help clients select the right keywords to target. The blog covers important aspects of keyword targeting, like relevance percentages, relative difficulty and customer value, and that's only the first 3 posts!

Dan also readily gives his time to answer questions at the HighRankings forum and occassionally makes an appearance at SearchEngineWatch, as he did in order to help SEOmoz develop the keyword difficulty tool several months ago. His company, SEO Research Labs, also offers a $99 keyword research package that appears to be one of the great bargains in SEO.