rencke - 3:08 pm on Mar 10, 2006 (gmt 0)

If you really want to target the Swedish market and give yourself a local flavour, you should go for www.widget.se rather than swedish.widget.com See: [nic-se.se...] for a list of registrars.

Having said that, I should mention that we recently put a 475-page dot-com travel planning site about Stockholm online in English. Amazingly, the majority of the business transacted is actually from Sweden, suggesting that neither English nor dot-se is really necessary. Furthermore, all of our dot-se sites are hosted in the UK and that hasn't hurt rankings at all. We are in the top 5 for all important keywords in a very competitive environment.

If you want to go for European business, you should start by translating for markets where people don't understand Engish as well as they do in Scandinavia: France, Spain and Italy, adding German for good measure - they will appreciate it.

Dot-coms work well everywhere. A nice touch is to translate widget.com into the respective language. If you check my profile site, you will see an example of how it can be done for 20 languages. Good luck!