I ran a multi-country front door web site for a multi-national company (now merged out of existence, sadly), as well as running the web site for the US subsidiary. Over a three year period, I got both sites from zero presence (over 2/3s of the pages were orphans when I took over) to in the top three positions in Yahoo, Google, and MSN.

Each country had its own web site with its own in-country TLD and domain. The US site performed the same way, using a second domain that I bought (tallyus). The main site (tally.com) had a gateway page with a javascript-driven rotation of 20 mixed product photos from worldwide (not all products were sold in all countries).

In addition, the gateway page contained keywords that encompassed everything we believed might draw searches anywhere in the world (about 40 words total, all in English). The Javascript rotation hot-linked to each country as its product(s) displayed and there were the obligatory text links at the bottom (oh, boy, did the foreign subsidiaries bitch about that - until the page appeared in every search they performed).

There was really no secret to what was accomplished. I worked with the US product marketing managers and we tested and tested and tested different combinations of keywords. It took three years to climb into the penthouse but a year after the tally web server was shut down post-merger, the site still ranked in the first two pages of the search engines.

Michael