vitaplease - 9:53 am on Jun 18, 2002 (gmt 0)

I am facing the same dilemma ish:

At the moment I have a .com and a .nl.
Under the .com I have English, French and German pages.

My site's audience would mainly be technology specific problem solving for an engineering audience.
Apart from Google now dominating the search market, I would guess Google has a disproportionally high search market share with this audience.

I have found that, outside the english language, getting good rankings within Google is feasable if you are not in a mainstream business (there is much less competing content, but there are also fewer hubs/directories from which you could earn links).

I am hoping to open German and French offices in the coming years but not now.
Now that Google recently introduced the option of searching only for sites within a country, I am wondering if I should go for .fr and .de listings as well. (your example of listing a .be would not help for France in this case).

All the reasons Heini mentions add to that way forward.
For example, I have found DMOZ/ODP is not that quick or easy in listing different language versions (sub-directory) of the .com site in the "world section"

Having a local presence could start out to be a postal address with a re-routed telephone to the home country. (we have started with a german and french person in the main office). Next step might be starting a regional office.
I am thinking of registering the local (post) offices near to the main industrious areas [webmasterworld.com] even if the local office will not materialise in the near future.

Heini, what do you mean by "cc.tld" ?