I have already looked into Copyscape as a means of alerting me if anything gets plagiarized--it is so widespread, as you've learned from even a recent article. The most common articles I've written over the past two years are in the personal growth and writer's tips categories, but I'm sure there isn't a "type" of articles plagiarizers go for--just anything they believe they can make a couple of bucks from stealing. Another advantage of writing on Xomba is that Nick has said that he will go to bat with us to get plagiarized articles pulled from other websites. Here in the States, that process often involves using postal mail to mail a copy of the original article and a statement of ownership to the web hosting company, which can be daunting if we had to go it alone. Anyway, I'm glad you found a system that works for you and I will consider it once I get to that point in my process. Thanks! CLICK HERE TO JOIN XOMBA TODAY!

https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal Just punch in your writing subject and you'll get a return of what words and phrases people are using to search for that subject. CLICK HERE TO JOIN XOMBA TODAY!

SEO is search engine optimization. In other words, checking your article topic in Google's keyword tool to find which words are the most searched-for and ensuring that your article contains enough of them throughout to get more hits when people Google the subject. It helps with driving traffic to your article. SERPs are the Search Engine Result Pages. When you Google something, there can be anywhere from one to hundreds of thousands of "hits" returned in the search. Your goal is to get your article returned on the first page of the search because your reader is more likely to click your article. Some people will look for things on the second or third pages, but rarely will they click a dozen pages down. The fact that people won't click so far down is one of the reasons it's a bad idea to "ambulance chase" the latest stories on Google Hot Trends. In general, if you write a story about something that people were searching for hours, you will be competing with thousands of other writers throwing together a few words on the same subject and your article may be buried on the SERPs. The way to check to see if your work has been plagiarized is to copy-and-paste a sentence from your article--something rather unique about it, if possible--into the Google search box and see what returns. Many of the people who plagiarize articles will just copy them verbatim into the submission box in article directories, remove any bylines or author names, and submit them as their own. There are many article directories that have more plagiarized content than original articles and even the plagiarizers steal from each other. The reason you want to make sure your articles are not plagiarized, particularly not posted verbatim elsewhere, is that the smarter search engines will assign a lower page rank to your original article in the SERPs and you will find your article buried. That's why I created my index spreadsheet first. It is easier to do my checking if I have one list of everything and can go about it systematically. Thanks for your comment! CLICK HERE TO JOIN XOMBA TODAY!