“Who is it that you’re aspiring to grow into?”

That question was posed to me just a few months ago. Not by a life coach. Not by a spiritual advisor. But by a guy I had hired to build me a new Web site.

“Huh?” was my cavewoman-like reply.

“That’s the response I usually get,” Pete Lacis, president of Phaseous Technology Solutions, said during our recent interview.

But the question is the perfect example of what distinguishes Lacis from the many talented Web designers out there – he has a marketing and public relations background to go with his insatiable desire to understand how things work. So when a client like me comes to him seeking more online visibility (translated: more life coaching clients), he probes a bit first.

“How do you want to be portrayed?” he asked.

Simple questions these are not, at least not for me. Lacis had already noticed that my existing site had a tagline that identified me as a certified life coach, but he also knew I had been writing this Game Plan column for a while. He took the initiative and created a new tagline that said, “Writer, Columnist, Life Coach” and showed me what it looked like in draft form. I was bowled over.

“Oh yeah, that’s it,” I said. With that one step, he had actually gotten to the essence of who I am, how I wanted to be portrayed, who I had grown into.

And while all of this was exciting, so was the prospect of some SEO in my life. Yes, that’s right, I’m showing off because I now know what Search Engine Optimization is. Thanks to Lacis, it has gotten into my bloodstream and fascinates the living heck out of me. His company name, Phaseous, is a word he invented so it would appear at the top of a Google search. Do you see where I’m going with this?

“I’ve been a technology fan as long as I can remember,” Lacis said. “I got in on the ground floor of the communication revolution.”

A political science and history major in college, Lacis’ original intent was to be a lobbyist because at that point in time his desire to find out how things work was focused on government. However, his first job out of college was at MWW Group, a public relations firm in East Rutherford, N.J. His natural inquisitiveness about where the technological world was going in the mid-1990s and his deep love for that aspect of the business led to Lacis becoming the youngest vice president and executive board member at the company at age 25. After 11 years at MWW Group, Lacis decided to fulfill a personal dream and move to Colorado last year. His very own company was soon born.

Now, at a time when Lacis says Google “has become part of our vernacular” -- as in “Just Google it” – he is in his element. He can help maximize a business’ or individual’s Web presence, an especially useful skill to have in these rough economic times when people can really use the boost. He calls his wife’s business – a company called Girls Fight Back – his very own Petri dish in this regard.

“Back in 2002 we turned to the Internet for her business,” Lacis said of the first Web site that he helped his wife create for her company. Fast forward to 2007. He worked his SEO magic – he almost always uses free-to-the-public tools like WordPress -- and her traffic doubled almost overnight. “First it was a brochure, now it’s a resource,” he said.

The Lacis mantra, which he emphasized several times in our interview, is simple – accurate, timely, relevant content. Think about it. If you create a pretty site but the content doesn’t change, why would anyone come back? That’s how Lacis convinced me to put my blog at the center of everything on my home page. Furthermore, he has urged me to create key words for each entry. And while he explained Google page rank, RSS feeds, meta information and a host of other things, if you really want to understand it all you’ll have to go directly to the source (www.phaseous.com). I, for one, decided to just trust the expert and keep some things on a need-to-know basis.

“The average person can be center stage,” Lacis said. “But these are changing times. A few years ago, everything was about flash and animation. But all this flash stuff is invisible to search engines. Maybe an artist or someone famous is fine with just having a brochure, but most of us rely on search engines to find us.”

Once Lacis transitioned my former Web site – a beautiful one that was hard for me to let go – over to WordPress, I was won over instantly by the control it gave me. I am in the driver’s seat and only need to contact him for more involved changes. For example, each day I blog and twice a week I update the site with the latest editions of Game Plan. I can make changes as I see fit. It’s a blast and it’s good for business besides. I’m also hooked into three different places that gauge my site traffic.

“I look at site stats like I do a retirement portfolio,” Lacis said. “It’s not to stare at every day, but you should be mindful of it. It empowers you to make decisions.”

All from creating a more visible Web presence. Who’d have thought?

Nancy Colasurdo is a practicing life coach and freelance writer. Her Web site is www.nancola.com. Please direct all questions/comments to FOXGamePlan@gmail.com.