Writing Headlines for Search Engines

Gone are the days when editors and journalist would write witty and clever headlines to attract “human readers.” The headlines are now boring than ever before as the main goal is catch the attention of the “search bots” – that will anyway bring in more “human readers” to your articles.
From The NY Times:

Headlines in newspapers and magazines were once written with readers in mind, to be clever or catchy or evocative. Now headlines are just there to get the search engines to notice. And both Twitter and Facebook have become republishers, with readers on the hunt for links with nice, tidy headlines crammed full of hot names to share with their respective audiences.
As a reader, I see his point. When I scan my list of aggregated articles in an RSS feed, looking for information that I seem to need to know right now, I am ruthless: the obscure, the off-beat, the mysterious, frequently go unclicked.

Jim Brandy agrees – “The headlines don’t have to be boring, but they have to be descriptive and direct so that they show up in mobile and RSS feeds in a way that lets people know what they are being asked to click on.”