Well, because search engines drive traffic to your articles!

Last year, when the New York Times stopped charging for access to editorials and opinion through its Times Select service, it said that “that many more readers started coming to the site from search engines and links on other sites instead of coming directly to NYTimes.com.”

“What wasn’t anticipated was the explosion in how much of our traffic would be generated by Google, by Yahoo and some others,” said Vivian L. Schiller, senior vice president and general manager of the site, NYTimes.com.

Another reason to rewrite headlines for the Web is that the headline can appear on the homepage as a link, without the subhead,  photograph or pull-quote that give people more context about the article in a newspaper.

Or it will appear in an RSS feed.

Or perhaps the headline is re-purposed and beamed out to a mobile phone.

So how do you create or search engine optimized headlines?

Here are a few tips:

1. You want people’s names in the headline, especially if they are famous or in the news.
2.  You want to provide geographic information if the article is about a specific place.
3. You want keywords from the article text in the headline.
4. Spell out words completely–no abbreviations.
5. Consider word choice: Would someone use another word more naturally to do a search? For example: Handouts v. Bailouts.
6. Think about related words to your topic that help narrow the topic. For example, an article about lawns and their environmental impact: lawns, fertilizer, weed, kill, pesticide, pollution, and runoff.
7. Use common words that reflect specific situations: conflict, battle and tension.
8. Use common words that reflect specific subjects: Computer security: hacking, hackers, security, firewall, attack, network, flaw.
9. Order of the keywords is important-with the first couple of words weighed more heavily. (The more words before the keywords, the less effective the headline)
10. Within the first few paragraphs of your copy, use the same keywords from the headline. Search engines are looking for confirmation that a page is about what the headline says it is about.
11. Just as linking out is important in blogging, always linking to related articles within your website helps your page rise in search engines.
12. Linking out to other sites is good as long as they are reputable sites like .gov, .edu and other institutions, companies, organizations. Link farms are bad!

Try Google’s Keyword Tool for keyword ideas.

As an example, here is a fantastic analysis by Stephen Spencer about a New York Times piece. It really touches on many of the items listed above:

Let’s take writing a news story headline as an example. One headline in a recent edition of The New York Times is “Tangoing Cheek to Cheek for 3 Minutes in the Park.” The story is about dancers hooking up in Central Park to tango and otherwise skip and hop together. The title above is fun and creative. It may not be fully optimized for search engines, but in fact, it’s not far off.

Take a look at how Spencer breaks that headline down to create a more SEO-friendly headline.