Is it effective to have start pages in multiple languages?

Can this improve results in International SE's and enable intl PPC ads?

[kilo]

My company has customers across the world, We develop softwart and have distributors in many different countries. While our site is currently only available in English we are thinking of making intro pages in other language that would link to the distributor sites (Written in their language) and also have a link to the English site(with a msg saying that it is in English).
Would this enable us to have international Overture and Google ads? say for French and German.

And how can this affect our results on international search engines?
Our domain name will remain as ".com" so just single introductory pages will be written entirely in the international language.

So i'm just wondering how effective this is, and if anyone has tried this out before? thanks

[Rumbas]

Somewhat old, but still relevant:

Translations will get you top rankings in major search engines, part 1 [webmasterworld.com]

Translations will get you top rankings in major search engines, part 2 [webmasterworld.com]

[webcertain]

Hi kilo,
you sure can create a landing page for each language, but this is purely for pay for performance, the organic optimisation would require more efforts (several pages, cctld or sub-folder..).
Cheers,
Johann

[rencke]

Thanks for remembering my old post Rumbas (I am so proud) but actually it has become more outdated than you think. The reason is that the most important engines in Europe - the national variants of Google - nowadays have the default set to "Search Web" so you have to mark the radio button for local language or local sites. I don't know how many people actually do that, but I suspect they might be in minority.

Perhaps better advise is found in my old strategy primer [webmasterworld.com]. At least, that is what I would recommend today.

[Rumbas]

Thanks for dropping in rencke. Always nice to see the Godfather of the Euro Forum giving out some of his valuable experiences :)

You right of course, the primer is probably a better choice, however I would recommend reading all of the threads and maybe even take a peak at the Library [webmasterworld.com] too.