Writing articles for the web is an effective way to bring more traffic to your site. You write the article, you include a link in the author's info box, you submit it to article distributors and it gets reproduced with a link back to your site. You get traffic from the link as well some kudos from the search engines which will eventually build even more traffic. Bonza!

But what happens if someone just grabs your article and reuses it without the link? You get nothing for your effort in writing the article!

Before you can do anything about it you need to know how to find the culprits. Enter stage left our friends at Google. Google has a wonderful service called Google alerts which will send you an email if and when a page containing a keyword or keyword phrase is found by its busy little spiders.

Access Google Alerts by going to www.google.com/alerts Then you can enter your keyword phrase inside double quotes, select Web for Search Type and decide on a frequency of report. You can come back to change any of these details later, experience will guide you to the best settings for your situation. Easy-peasy. Every time the spiders find your phrase you will get an email telling you where it was found.

The alerts will tell you how successful your distribution method has been and it will also tell you if people are reproducing your articles without including the link. Then you can do something about

What has this got to do with pizzazz? Distinctive keyword phrases are needed to make this monitoring work. If you use a phrase like - web promotion - or like - traffic building - you will get lots of false positives, webpages with the phrase but not your article.

So you need to spice up your articles with some unusual words in unusual combinations - in other words pizzazz. Use two or three word phrases, just ignore any punctuation, Google will treat it as spaces. Don't forget to put your key phrase into double quotes. Google will then find just your page or copies of it and you can easily check that everyone is playing cricket. Pirates will be quickly detected.

For this item I could use any of these as my keyword phrase - false positive webpages, pizzazz distinctive, traffic bonza, cricket pirates All in double quotes). None are likely to appear elsewhere on the web, but if they do Google Alerts will pick them up, and I can edit the alert to ensure only this article is reported.

Writing articles with pizzazz (use a thesaurus) is more fun, and your articles will stay in the mind of your readers mind a little longer.

About The Author

Darby Higgs is editor of OzArticles at http://wwww.ozarticles.com a clearing house of articles with Australian content.

darby @ozarticles.com