One of the things I love about the search marketing community is when we reach out and use the power of search for good. All too often we in the search community jump on the trolling, bashing, clashing, name calling, negative attitude sheeple bandwagon and lose our better selves. It seems that our need to go negative makes us loose sight of what really matters in life.

But this isn’t the case with many in the community even though that is the perception. Some of those that are examples of using search for good are; Seobook.org The Nonprofit’s Guide to SEM, SEO Refugee’s charity link meme, Search Engine College free charity site courses, GrayWolf’s v7ndotcom Elursrebmem St. Jude’s fundraiser and Jennifer Laycock at Search Engine Guide leveraging the carcrahser.com seo contest as a milk bank fundraiser.

In the most recent search for good projectDeric Loh, APAC Regional Search Marketing Manager at Soho Square in Singapore has won the $3,500 Market Motive PPC Scholarship with his paid search marketing plan for a non-profit agency. Market Motive is allowing each of their faculty members to give away one scholarship to its certification courses for the upcoming semester. Market Motive offers web-based internet marketing training and certification programs from bestselling authors and established industry professionals through videos, webinars, conference calls, and 24×7 Q&A.

The non-profit agency Deric chose was Smile Train which helps children with unrepaired cleft lips and palates. Smile Train’s mission is to provide free cleft surgery for millions of poor children in developing countries and to provide free cleft-related training for doctors and medical professionals. Deric said he chose Smile Train because, “I wanted to help these young kids who are unfortunate. I learned about Smile Train by reading Avinash Kaushik’s blog and his work in helping that organization.”

At Soho Square Deric manages the search marketing, paid and organic, for clients across Asia Pacific. Deric said “I first got started in search engine marketing developing websites and wanted to have my sites found in the search engines. I tested a lot of tactics, even ‘black hat’ tactics, which can get a site banned. I actually reported one of my sites to see how long it would take Google to ban it.” Deric added, “ Now I only use white hat tactics”.

Deric said he liked search marketing because of the constant changes in the industry. “I was thrilled to learn I had won this competition and am excited about learning from the world class faculty at Market Motive.”