I still remember my first true headline triumph. I was a reporter at a small paper in Sarasota, Fla., and I wrote a story about a company that was peddling scentless Omega-3 fish oil.

My headline: “In Cod They Trust.”

That was about six years ago, but today it wouldn’t fly—not on the Web, anyway.

The problem is that it’s just not SEO-friendly. A much better headline would include the keywords Omega-3, fish oil, benefits, supplement. It doesn’t leave much room for puns or plays on words.

The Atlantic has weighed in on this notion with its recent article “Google Doesn’t Laugh: Saving Witty Headlines in the Age of SEO.”

Matthew Crowley, a copy editor for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, has won awards for his oh-so-clever headlines. "I understand the shift toward search optimization," he told The Atlantic. "But I think we're losing something when we take the wordplay and surprise out of headline writing."

In many ways, SEO is killing the art of the clever headline in journalism, and it doesn’t seem like a trend that will reverse as long as such a huge chunk of Web traffic comes from search engines.

Gene Weingarten of the The Washington Post addressed this same issue last summer, and he didn’t offer optimism, either.

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