rel=canonical is a good alternative to noindex.  Both will prevent the article on your site from going into the index of Google or other search engines who honor rel=canonical.  From what I have seen, noindex works quicker.

The advantage of rel=canonical is that much of the link value of the article with the rel=canonical will be transferred to the specified source article.   I have used it on content that I own and have published on two domains.  The copy that receives the benefit of rel=canonical ranks better than expected.

If the article is public domain then there is no legal problem with republishing it verbatim with attribution.

If you have written a unique summary of substantive length of a public domain article then there is no need to noindex, worry about duplicate content, or a potential Panda problem.  That is best practice for reuse of public domain.

is there a standard practise/best practise for SEO to do this and ensure Google doesn't think i am plagerizing content etc

The best practice is to contact the author of the content and obtain permission.  That is the legal way to do it.  Otherwise you are committing copyright infringement which can land you in court.   If the owner files a DMCA with google (millions of pages get a DMCA each month) your page will be removed from the SERPs.  If you get a few DMCAs filed against you, it is possible that your whole site will be removed from the SERPs.

If you start republishing a lot of articles, even with permission, without setting them to noindex, then google will see your site as a duplicate content site and will either filter your site from the SERPs or hit you with a Panda problem.

Even better practice is to write unique content for your website.  Then nobody is going to take you to court, nobody will file DMCA, google will not filter you, and google will not Panda you.  If you can do that repeatedly with excellent content that visitors love then you will be in a position to make buckets of money.

Patrick gave a great answer above.

Now that you mention they are at the bottom of the page, I would definitely remove the h2 or hwhatever and simply style them with css.

Will that count as traffic from Google so it will increase the CTR from Google?

It is a good bet that Google uses multiple metrics that confirm one another to be sure that their rankings are not manipulated.  That traffic would also need to explore deep into the site, talk about it in social media,  write about it on blogs, return many times over a long course of time by typing the domain name into search boxes or the address window of the chrome browser.

So, instead of trying to fool google, just improve your website so that these things happen on their own.

"how to create stuff something"   (some people would pick this because they think that the absence of "in" makes for better keyword optimization)

"how to create stuff in something"   (I pick this because in addition to sounding better to the user it might be clicked more, and being clicked more, in my opinion, is more valuable today than keyword optimization.  Why?  Because google is pretty good at getting the keywords from your article into the title tag but getting people to do what you want them to do takes much more finesse. )