Reverse SEO is becoming both easier and more difficult for people managing a personal brand.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of getting your name to appear at the top of the search engine rankings, while reverse SEO pushes other results off the first page.

Occasionally, something not very flattering appears at the top of the search results, and it becomes necessary to push those rankings out of sight. That's what reverse SEO does.

Let's say someone takes a shot at your speaking ability after you speak at a conference. Normally you're on your game, but that day just wasn't great. Plus that guy wasn't too happy when you said you wouldn't take requests. But his negative blog post about how you wouldn't sing "Swinging on a Star" is now ranking #3 on Google. This is where reverse SEO comes in handy.

You can push that search result out of sight just by adding more content with your name on it to the search indexes. Reverse SEO basically means you're going to optimize more positive things in order to push the negative down.

Last summer, reverse SEO just involved putting content up on a website, blog, or forum discussion. Facebook and LinkedIn were also searchable, so if you were to put up some great content on those two sites (and no, Mafia War scores on Facebook don't count), you could easily reverse SEO your way out of a jam.

But here's where it gets easier. Google and Bing have announced partnerships and plans with social media tools like Twitter, as well as indexing things like Picasa and Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and other social networks.

Now, rather than putting up several blog posts (which we still recommend, since they're a little more evergreen than tweets and Flickr photos), you can tweet, upload photos and videos, and add some additional fun content that will reverse SEO your negative review off the front page.

But it's still important to continue to use some of the more text-heavy tools, like Blogger, WordPress, and Squidoo, to help create content. If you get a negative review, use your blog to counter it, but don't respond to it. Your reverse SEO efforts will fail if all you end up doing is drawing attention to the thing you're trying to hide in the first place.

(Because nothing will cause a reverse SEO campaign to backfire like "So some big jerk said I was a bad speaker and he gave me a negative review. Here's a link to his blog post, followed by a 27-point rebuttal.")

Instead, if you got a negative review for your presentation, talk about upcoming presentations. Reprise the talks you gave, and publish some of the tips and ideas you discussed. Talk about lessons you have learned in the past from "other" presentations where you didn't do so well.

Another way you can combine your blogging and social media in your reverse SEO campaign is to promote your blog posts through your different social networks. Use Twitter to tell your followers. Connect your blog through Networked Blogs on Facebook. Post your new article and a link on LinkedIn's status update window. Since these three tools appear in search engine results, not only will they add backlinks to your blog posts, but they're searchable as well.

Video SEO can be an important part of reverse SEO. As we've discussed in other blog posts, video SEO can be a little tricky. You need to make sure your target keywords appear in your titles and any surrounding text, and try to include an edited transcript of the video.