SEO Headlines - How I Grab Readers and Don't Let Go

If you really want to know how to write SEO headlines, look at any kind of headline that has to compete with lots of similar offers. Take a trade magazine, for example: if fifty different companies are advertising some variant on, say, cheap burlap bags, they're all going to do two things.
  1. Put "BURLAP BAGS" in the headline so prominently that you can't miss it if you skim.
  2. Add a pitch so compelling you're forced to read on.
And that's what SEO headlines should do, too. The first few words should almost always be the words you're trying to optimize for (if you're having trouble, insert a dash, a comma, or a colon into your keyword; Google won't care, but it makes things more readable).
And the rest of the article should do two things: it should deliver on the promise your SEO headline makes, and it should compel the reader to click on your links. After all, SEO is about driving targeted traffic. Keywords are part of targeting, but if you can make people interested, you can make them even more likely to keep on reading what you have to say.
SEO-focused headlines help your business, too, because they force you to state how you'll solve someone's problems-right now. There's no mystery to SEO headlines; no beating around the bush, or using shades of implication to get your point across. Nope. SEO headlines are all business, all the time. And even though they make it hard to give free reign to your creative impulses, they give you a chance to say something that's made even cleverer by the constraints you face.
SEO copywriting isn't easy-which is why so many people try hard and fail. But ranking #1 means outranking thousands, or even millions of other contenders, so there's no reason to expect it to be easy. That said, following the basic rules of reason-why advertising and feature-focused sales will get you most of the way there.