The search-engines crawling the Web are becoming increasingly influential, delivering more than 30 percent of the traffic on some newspaper, magazine or television news Web sites.

But these software bots do not appreciate the subtleties of wit, irony, humour or stylish writing. They are inhumanly fast yet boringly literal-minded. The software is left-brain whilst humans are usually right brain.

The art of journalism has always been to find headlines drawing culture into titles, but that creativity is wasted on the search engines.

The BBC News web site offers two headlines. One headline, usually on the first Web page, is clever and designed to attract human readers. Then, click to a second Web page and a factual headline appears with the article itself, which is search engine friendly.

The Associated Press, which feeds articles to 11,000 newspapers, radio and television stations, limits its online headlines to less than 40 characters as a concession to small screens.

Journalists and copywriters might be wise to do some keyword research to determine the most-searched words that relate to their subject and include them in the first few sentences of the copy.

At Realnet we routinely apply this principal when writing copy for our clients. In an increasingly competitive world on the Internet, gaining visibility amongst a growing number of competitors is a challenge that needs constant attention.

But at the end of the day the copy is there to provide information to the people reading it. And this fact must not be sacrificed to the new god, Google.