Innovative design of the site - webcheck it out

Today quick post on the website I’ve dropped by recently. It has very interesting and unusual design that feels fresh and clear. Great way to stand out in the crowd of advertising and interactive agencies. Everything there conveys clearly the message of being innovative and open-minded. The colors, the space, the navigation and visual structure…

The site is veery slow to load at first but it’s worth the wait so check it out.

To put also grain of salt there - the navigation is timeline oriented - great for extended “about us” and company history pages. However the page should clearly spell out the offer and call to action for visitors - making sure that all key visitors segments are properly addressed. The site is also very unfriendly to search engines and to the websites that would like to link to specific elements.

So - interesting fresh concept and approach to site navigation. Food for thoughts for everyone!

You like it? Dislike it? Want to share other interesting examples? All your comments are very welcome!

Update on my Google search engine optimization efforts

Couple of days ago I’ve given you story of my article with review of Expedia website called best online flight booking website. It scored very well with Google and ranked very high in couple of important keywords. I did some tests and optimizations of this post to achieve high ranking in Google and wrote post about my efforts. You can read my post on search engine optimization with Google.

Here I’d like to update you on my further SEO efforts on the article since then. Most important was to correct the keywords I’ve chosen for optimization. I’ve stoped mentioning flight booking “engine” and started calling it “website“. I’ve updated it consistently in title and copy of the post as well as the links that pointed to the post.

I’ve also reviewed text of the post to more consistently mention online flight booking through the post (don’t use shortcut but the full phrase instead). Some search engine optimization (SEO) experts claim that being too consistent can actually harm your ranking in Google as Google starts to suspect that page is too much SEO-oriented and too little valuable from content side. It’s called keyword stuffing and certainly Google tries to detect this. However for me all worked just fine.

One of the often asked questions in your SEO efforts is - when will Google rescan my pages and when my changes will become visible. Everyone wants to see results of the changes ASAP. It depends heavily on the value of the site as perceived by Google. For valuable sites (and blogs in WordPress domains are seen as valuable) you get rescanned at least once per week. So wait patiently!

Don't be surprised to see references to WordPress blog in here. I run my blog in both - Blogger and WordPress at the same time. It gives me opportunity to test both interfaces and work on search engine optimization. See my post on this subject - with comparison of both sites.

Result? - TaDaaaa! I’m #1 in “flight booking website“, I’m also within 1st page of “online flight booking“. Of course things even improve when you add “best” to the keywords. However all works fine even in shorter form. Don’t be surprised when you see other results on Google at this very moment - Internet is ever changing.

BTW - I start to get traffic on search engine optimization (SEO) related keywords also now - on my posts with story on how I got ranked on Google so nicely.

bajki

Bajki
Postanowiłem takie bajki dla dzieci stworzyć i podarować wszystkim rodzicom. Bo ja uwielbiam czytać i opowiadać bajki moim synom. Ale też wiem jak ciężko ich czasami wyciszyć i uspokoić.

Tak powstały Zasypianki - bajki dla dzieci na dobranoc. To nie są takie zwykłe bajki dla dzieci. Te bajki do czytania są napisane specjalnie, żeby pomóc dzieciom dobrze zasnąć. Dobrze to znaczy spokojnie, w błogim, kołyszącym i zrelaksowanym stanie. W którym będą czekały na nie tylko spokojne sny. :-)

Na moim blogu napisałem również bajkę, która łączy bajki disneya z bajkami do czytania.

Ostatnio zacząłem też pisać teksty na temat bajek terapeutycznych. Bajki terapeutyczne mogą bardzo pomóc naszym dzieciom w pokonaniu ich lęków. Poczytaj więc tutaj:

Bajki terapeutyczne-jak je tworzyć? oraz Bajki, które leczą.

To wszystko znajdziesz w moim blogu, do którego Cię gorąco zapraszam!

Do blogu dodałem strony poświęcone sikaniu dzieci w łóżeczku: moczenie nocne u dzieci. Piszę o tym co pomaga, a co nie - jakie leki, wysadzanie, itd.

Pozdrawiam Bajkowo!

Blogs - one of the top 5 ways to generate good business leads

Interesting recent study from MarketingSherpa. 1900 marketing people from technology companies were surveyed in June 2006. One very interesting question that was asked was about effective methods of lead generation. And it wasn’t about sheer number of lead - it was stressing quality of leads.

It turned out that survey marketeers pointed to blogs as one of the top 5 ways to generate such high quality leads. It was especially popular for software vendors and ASPs. Other in top 5 included free trial demo (again for software), webcast/webinar, whitepaper and with lower scores - podcast.

Some surprises were also on the side of least effective methods - there were sweepstakes (where someone could win t-shirt or PDA) and viral marketing. These methods can be very good for creating even huge amount of leads. But these leads is often total crap.
You can see the executive summary and samples of the report here or purchase the whole report in SherpaStore.

There are some other very interesting ideas in this report so I’m sure I’ll revisit it in other posts as well.

Business usage of blogs - summary

Here is summary and directory of my series of postson business usage of blogs. They were written over couple of days and here is recap of the series:
Chapter 1 - basic usage of blogs by companies
Chapter 2 - should your company start blog, do’s and dont’s there
Chapter 3 - adverblogs - what they are and when they can be used
Chapter 4 - when blog can be used as core web activity of company - as company website.
Hope you find this primer on business usage of blog useful. All your comments and feedback are welcome!

Business usage of Blogs (part 4) blog as company website

In this last chapter of my guide to business usage of blogs I wanted to touch the subject of blogs as company website. Can blog be good material for company website? We associate blogs mostly with personal and private diaries. However blogs boil down to 2 key elements:

• content management system (CMS) that is used to create and frequently update webpages
• websites where informations are stored time-ordered order - from newest to oldest.

Such combination - to get new information often + to easily see what’s new and added is excellent way to create bond with visitors. Therefore it’s best used for companies and brands that have or want to build strong customer loyalty. Think about such brands - Harley Davidson, Nokia, Starbucks… their loyal customers may want to check-out what’s new in them. For them - blog-type website can be attractive to customers.

You don’t have to be superbrand to try same approach. Think about following case (not real - just artificial one):

Ristorante Fiorentino
Imagine that you run good and popular local Italian restaurant. Blog-type website can work for you well. Of course you need to have set of basic links to current menu, address, contact info, reservation, etc. However the main content of the site would be blog posts. The content could be:

News from the restaurant:

• changes of menu
• new meal or desert in the menu
• opening of the outside garden in spring
• special offer or promotion
• theme evening - e.g. for various regions of Italy
• celebrity visiting the restaurant
• various celebration - 10 years of restaurant, 1000 pizza served

Value added content:

• Italian recipes for home cooking
• facts and hostory of various Italian specials
• information about Italy (for tourists, food lovers)
• information on Italian ingredients used (e.g. how to choose best tomatoes for your pasta)
• mini-competition on the knowledge of Italy with dinner at restaurant as the prize.
• possibilities are almost endless

As you might see there should be plenty of content flowing on daily and weekly basis. All this can create “sticky” content that can make people come back to the website and also to the restaurant.

The restaurant and website should cross-promote itself - customers of the restaurant should be directed to the website and vice-versa. The website can offer coupons and discounts for restaurant that could be extra reason to visit it.

So - blog-type experience is great when creating bond - especially when you offer value added content to your blog - not just company information. And not just for restaurant... ;-)

Comparison of sites for blogging - Blogger and WordPress

At first - I’ve started my blog on Blogger. It’s very good but I’ve decided to test also other blog services and I’ve chosen WordPress. At this moment I’m running my blog at the same time in both places: rightweb.wordpress.com and rightweb.blogspot.com. I did also some tests of the blog.com website but since I didn’t liked it at all - so I don’t compare it here.

Here are pros and cons for Blogger and WordPress:

Blogger

• Pros: good choice of templates, very flexible templates, simple and intuitive post designers, supports commercial blogs (with easy AdSense implementation), very good help system and documentation, doesn’t show advertisements on your blog, very good support for JavaScript - you can put any add-ons you like
• Cons: Cannot schedule posts for publishing at certain date, necessity to publish your posts to other server (extra steps, sometimes problematic), doesn’t support categories of posts (only simple list), difficult to use spellchecker

WordPress

• Pros: good choice of templates, simple and intuitive post designers, built-in simple blog traffic reporting that includes also stats for feeds, excellent support for high ranking in search engines, doesn’t show advertisements on your blog, very good spellchecking interface
• Cons: doesn’t support JavaScript (which closes the door for majority of add-ons), templates not very flexible and difficult to update, doesn’t support any good traffic reporting system (only simple counters), weak help system, doesn’t support advertising in your blogs, doesn’t support FireFox fully.

And the winner is… it’s a draw with WordPress being slightly better.

I like WordPress interface better - I would be very happy to switch totally to WordPress if it would support JavaScript. I could then use good metrics system (e.g. Google Analytics). It should also open up in the future for commercial blogs (with e.g. Google AdSense).

Blogger is very good too but it needs to start supporting categorization of posts and have ability to schedule posts for the future.

In meantime - I run blog in both places. :-)

What are your thoughts - do you see other differences? Do you know other good blogging sites? Your comments are very welcome!

Google search engine optimization (SEO) example - how I get half of my blog traffic

I’m getting good share of my traffic from natural searches on Google. Here you will find some insights on how I managed to do search engine optimization for my page and rank it very high in Google. Feel free to use them to improve your pages visibility and your understanding of how Google works.

In my blog among other things I do reviews of websites and pass my comments and ideas for improvement. I did review of Expedia website in article about best online flight booking website. It was about 2 weeks ago. Now (Aug-16) it’s on #4 place on Google for “best flight booking” search, #1 for “best booking engine” and in absolute top for many other related searches. Don’t be surprised when you see other results on Google at this very moment - Internet is ever changing.

Don't be surprised to see references to WordPress blog in here. I run my blog in both - Blogger and WordPress at the same time. It gives me opportunity to test both interfaces and work on search engine optimization. See my post on this subject - with comparison of both sites.

As you may notice for many searches related to flight booking my pages appear very high. I have beaten sites like Expedia or Travelocity. Many companies pay big amount of money for search engine optimization to get to top spots or by buying these keywords. How could it possibly happen that I’m on top?

This post is not meant to be exhaustive explanation of Google PageRank mechanism and search engine optimization (SEO) - for this you can turn to some very good sources (I recommend TopRank blog or Pronet advertising primer).

Here is how it worked for me and advices on what Google checks:

• Web domain of my blog - must be good
  My blog is within WordPress domain (my WordPress blog got higher Google ranking than Blogger one). The WordPress.com domain is well known for Google (many sites links here) and Google ranks it very high. The fact that I’m within this domain helps a lot already. Companies and people with their own domain need to work to gain high ranking for them.
• Title of my page - must have your keywords
  My title says “the right web - webdesign and webmarketing » best online flight booking website?“. Such long title is not best but does the job here. However the most important is that it has all relevant keyword that I want Google to rank - “best”, “online”, “flight”, “booking”, “website”. Don’t overdo this - 4-6 keywords is fine 10+ might be not…
  Page heading - must have your keywordsYour keywords should be somewhere on the page in big letters - it should be header of the page. In most of blog templates - title is displayed in big letters. And that’s how it should be.
• Content of the page - must be relevant
  First of all - it must be relevant to the title and topic (here - to online flight booking). You must convince Google that your page is really about the keywords that you had in your title. Google checks this by looking whether these keywords appear on the page - not too often, not too rare. Best advice is - write good article on the topic and use keyword whenever it makes sense. No tricks here is good trick. Tip - If you want to check how Google sees your page in relationship to your keywords - check out the Google “copy of the page“. All your keywords are nicely highlighted there.
• Content of the page - make it short
  Keep your content short - this way it’s perceived as more relevant. Think about it - text of the article appears also on main page of my blog, yet the homepage doesn’t appear anywhere in the results of search for “flight booking”. Simply - it’s there among many other articles about many topics and it’s not seen by Google as that relevant. Thanks God we have permalink and each post in blog has it’s own page.
• Links to the page - must have keywords in link name
  This is one of the most important elements. There must be links to your page from other pages. And it’s not only about quantity (number of these links) - it’s even more important to have quality there. Quality means - these links must contain your keywords in the text. See two examples:
  * Check out article about best online flight booking website
  * For information on online flight booking - check this article
  The first one rocks. The second is not really good. The second suggest that your article might be related to following keywords - “check” and “article” which confuses Google.
• Links to the page - in blogs
  If you look at my blog you will see that each title of the page is link to the page with post. If I choose title well and have keywords there that I immediately have keywords also within link. Great! Make sure that you use template that uses titles of posts as links - not your name, not the date, not the word “permalink” - THE TITLE!!! Choose the template that has this or update your template.
• Url address of your page - must have keywords
  The permalink to my post on best onlin flight booking website looks like this:
  http://rightweb.wordpress.com/2006/08/07/best-online-flight-booking-engine/
  You may notice that all the keywords are there in the url. Most of blogging sites automatically do it - just make sure that your title has them. If you do the url manually - make sure that it has all the right keywords.
• Metatags
  Well - I know they are checked by Google but they don’t matter that much. Actually - I haven’t inserted them at all. Google checks first and foremost on what is visible to people. And that’s how it should be.

Most important
In the game of search engine optimization most important is to choose right keywords and then to stick to them - in title, copy, heading, url, links, everywhere. One extra tip - when you test various ideas of optimization you often think - has Google refreshed your page? Are they already taken into consideration. Well - it’s no brainer - just check Google “copy of your page“.

I’m still playing with search engine optimization for Google of the page and links around it - I hope it will results in even better placement. I’ll share the results of my tests as we go forward.

You may ask about quality of this traffic… Is it worth to optimize to get traffic that might be worthless. Well - indeed the traffic is coming from keywords not related to webdesign and webmarketing. However all titles of my pages state clearly what this blog is about so I hope interested people come.

All your comments welcome! I hope my advices will help you improve your results. Share your ideas as well!

How much money can you earn with Google AdSense?

What if want to earn decent salary with Google AdSense. What kind of site you need to have to earn lets say $100,000 per year. In nutshell - quick calculation shows that you will need to have ~14000 page views per day for your site targeting average priced keywords. Or maybe 2740 pageviews/day for high priced keywords (btw - highest paid keywords are in legal space).

Of course it's all number game but you get the idea. Whole analysis was done very well by ZillionBits blog. All the best in your career selling ad space on your sites! :-)

The secret of writing good text for website or newsletter

When creating texts for newsletter and for your website it’s very difficult to make it appealing for people. It usually seems dry and unattractive. It takes good copywriter to write powerful and persuasive copy. The key is to make it sound like it’s written not for average Joe but for you (yes - YOU).

The idea is to create personas. Personas are profiles of concrete customers. They don’t have to be actual live and interviewed customers but need to well represent demographic group. Such profile of persona needs to be created in very detailed way - where does the person live, what are her interests and hobbies, how does she looks like (photo is very welcome), what is important for her, what makes her tick. After reading such profile you need to feel like you know this person pretty well and you know how to speak with her.

Marketeers should create couple of such personas that represents various customer groups and then - when preparing something - creating website, promotion, writing text for newsletter article - they should always do it for specific persona, not for average, unidentified customer. The copywriter should always ask himself - “Would Barbara be interested in this article?”.

This makes creating copy so much easier and makes the texts so much more attractive to people. Surveys show that more and more companies plan to adopt persona based copywriting within next year (40% of IT hardware companies in 2006).

Worth consider for your website/newsletter/blog.

How companies can use blogs - part 3

Here is on the usage of blogs in marketing. Starting employee or corporate blog - if done right - is great booster for company brand. You get personal, open, friendly face on company image. You open discussion channel with customers which is always welcome. More about how and when to do this - in previous chapter of my guidelines below.

Here on the subject of adverblogs. These blogs are done often in a way that doesn’t clearly explain connection with company brand. They often use the fact that people explain in blogs their experience with products and services. Some companies try to fake such blogs to present positive image of company offerings.

The big threat here is that this abuses trust of customers and can really back-fire on company. The example can be ilovemyhptv blog (can you imagine that anyone actually trusting such blog?). Most people disliked this and lots of negative buzz was created. HP has taken down this site long time ago. BTW - Doesn’t anyone has idea where and how to still see it’s content?

In which cases you can effectively use adverblog?

• Character blog supporting fiction person from movie, tv series, book… Example - blog of Incredible Hulk supporting the movie and comic. Imagine blogs on someone from movie or tv series that you like and follow (I like The Simpsons and would be interested in e.g. Homer Simpsons blog)
• Some companies have character personalizing the brand - Duracell rabbit, Marlboro man (blog on his fight with lounges cancer maybe… , guys that shout “Whazzup!” in Bud light commercials. I’m not sure if these particular examples are best for blogs but I hope you get idea. In such cases - blog supporting such character supports brand as well. Good list of such characters is here.
• Best if targeted at consumers, especially young consumers

Outside of such situations adverblogs with characters present more potential drawbacks than benefits. Be careful there before you try to hide your company involvement in blog!

How companies can use blogs - part 2

More and more of the companies start their company blogs. Great - this means clearly that they are trendy. However it’s not right game for everyone. Here are couple of questions you need to ask yourself:

Are you ready for two-way discussion with customers?
Most companies believe that they have messages to customers. Blogs are about two-ways communication. If idea of discussion with customers is new and strange to you - don’t start it. If you already have ways to communicate with customers - blogs are great extensions to it. Be also prepared to react to customer feedback. You’ll loose customer confidence if they don’t see you reacting.

How much control you need to have over communications?
Some companies need to crosscheck legally every statement they make. If you look more like this - don’t start blog. It’s pointless.

Do you have something important and unique to say?
Press releases are not material for blog entries. You need to give more insight story in light way. You can ask for feedback and poll customers.

Have human face on the blog
Most of the successful blogs are done by real live people - with their unique styleand tone. Although some companies start company blog it’s usually better when someone (especially high level) is representing company there.

Some good examples of company blogs are Amazon Web Services Blog and Wells Fargo Guided by Historyblog. Example of company blog that looks good, is well maintained but lack life and guts is The Lobby - done by Westin hotel chain. Good blog but lacking two-way communication is Google blog.

Check out also interesting intro from Pronet Advertising blog on business blogs. Do you have other reality checks for successful company blogs? Have some good or bad examples? Your comments are very welcome!

In next parts of my primer I’ll give some examples of marketing usage of blogs and ideas on when blogs are best formats for company websites.

How companies can use blogs - part 1

I’m preparing for my colleagues from marketing departments analysis on how companies could use blogs. I’ll report my findings and ask for feedback as I go forward with it here in my blog.

First distinction is way of usage - ranging from very passive to very active.

On very passive side - companies can use blogs to listen to customers. If you use any of the blog search services out there - good one are Technorati, very promising, quick and complete one is coming from google. It is very good way to hear feedback on products, advertising campaigns and recent events. Lots of trash there but also lots of real valuable feedback.

Going further into active mode - companies can monitor blog and respond/comment on blogs. This is usually very well received by blog owners. However the bigger the company gets the more difficult it’s to find right owner for this. For publicly traded companies things are even more difficult as these companies need to be very careful in what kind of messages they pass and to make sure that various communication channels are treated equally.

Next steps are to allow employees to blog - it requires setting clear policy for blogging. It sets clear boundaries but also opens the door for blogs done by employees under company name. Good summary of similarities and differences of various corporate blogging policies can be found here.

In next days I’ll give overview of corporate usages of bloggings - in which cases it makes companies to start company blogs and marketing usage of blogs. Comments are welcome!

brother - where are you?

Geolocation. How useful is it? The sources claim that it’s accuracy is even exceeding 90% for country information, 80% for city information. Determining the country from an IP is quite easy. All IP are associated with country. Determining the city from an IP is more difficult. These information are in IPWHOIS for all IP ranges, however this info is not very accurate.

There can be many usages of it - you can target promotional offers better, you can lead customers to nearest resellers of your product (and even show the map on the way), you can make more attractive messages in banners by personalizing it (calling customers by city where they come from). Possibilities are endless…

Usefulness depends heavily on target customer group - if you target consumers or small SMBs - all should be fine. Watch out however when you target corporate customers. Due to their security rules they usually access the web via proxy which means that you will see address of the proxy - no city information, just country. In most of the cases - I’m recognized as coming from Germany, which is not true.

What’s your experience with it? Do you trust geolocation data? Do you see good usages of geolocation info in your business? Comments are welcome!

yahoo 10 years ago - share the laugh with me

Internet has gone long way over last years. Great way to experience it and look back is to use Internet Archive and it’s Wayback machine. It’s not new service but it’s worth to come back to it from time to time.

You can see your website evolving over the years. You can see one of the big famous ones - how they looked like 10 years ago. Take a look at yahoo website to have some laugh. That’s how it looked like in October 1996.

Also - if you want to check out the site that might be totally rewamped and changed and you want to check its content back in the past - this is your place. It doesn’t have all the possible days but has surprisingly lots of them, for great many sites. It claims to archive 55 billions of pages from 1996 till now.

Do you maybe know website that went even longer way from 1996? Share it here! Long live Internet! Long live Internet archive!

AOL scandal - how to use it

I will not speak about moral, technical or security aspect of this weird event. The bottom-line is that data on searches of more than 600 thousands of AOL users were made to public. These searches represent nice statistically significant sample of people search behavior on the net. Data that otherwise are kept as big business value by search companies.

There are no personal data there (great for poor AOL users ;-), but there is quite extensive information on user behavior. You have there all chain of searches with information on whether and what had these people actually clicked. See random example of this data here:
http://www.dontdelete.com/randusersearch.asp?Submit=Submit

You can use one of the services that were made quickly available (like http://www.dontdelete.com/) and put there keyword related to your business and company. You can see what chain of searches were people doing and what they were finding. Valuable data to understand people behavior.

Big thanks to crete_geek for adding very good search engine url (This one here at AskTheBrain gives you interesting info, like which searches did people not click on a result for. It's also very fast unlike the others.)

How to link to your site in your off-line materials?

Most of the companies when their online presence matures start to have pretty complex sites. As soon as they describe in complete way your company offerings and info to all key audiences (customers from various segments, investors, job seekers, media, etc) the site gets more and more difficult to find the right information quickly.

If this happens to you - you need to decide on what kind of web addresses to present in their off-line materials. Url of company homepage is less and less reasonable. You need to be more specific - build marketing url. Address that is easy to type in and memorize and leads directly to relevant page. Couple of ideas on how to approach marcom url and their pros and cons follow below:

build keyword into your domains
You add keyword within domain, right before your company.com name. Example: autos.yahoo.com. It has couple of advantages. The address is easy to read and short, it’s usually pretty easy to memorize. The main disadvantage is that if misspelled - visitors are out of your site. They don’t see your company message but rather nasty browser message about wrong domain.

add keyword after your domain
Example: www.apple.com/ipod. Pros: address is still pretty easy, when customers misspells something, there is good chance that she stays within the site. Cons: more difficult to say (on radio or voice-over in ad), you need to communicate “/” between domain and keyword.

promo code
I’ve seen it on ibm.com site but they abandoned it some time ago. On the company homepage you prominently present entry box with message “Enter your promo code here”. Customer that enters promo code are redirected to promo page. Pros: very short to communicate in ads, Cons: not everyone is used to it, might be confusing for customers, entry box can be missed.

My personal favorite (and I think most popular out there) is the keyword after company domain (the apple example). Do you know other approaches? You see other pros and cons of the ones above? Your comments are welcome!

Which countries click on banners?

We do have banner campaigns spanning across all European websites of my company. They are done centrally from one place - same image, same text (just translated), same message. What kind of differences in clicks on the banners would you expect from the countries?

I was really surprised to see how different results are - it can be as big as between 0,2% for one country and almost 2% for the others. It seems like there are two sources of these differences:

• internet adoption in the country - especially for countries early on the path to use Internet - Serbia, Bulgaria, Africa (all countries but South Africa), Ukraine and some others.
  
• cultural implications - more difficult to judge and measure - things like:


• attitude toward marketing and advertising. Some countries (e.g. eastern Europe ones - Hungary, Poland, Czech) don't trust advertising and therefore are not assuming that banners lead to relevant countries. This results in lower clickthrough
• how focused people are - some countries don't mind distractions and are more eager to choose different path by clicking banners (I've seen it in Turkey).

The differences of ClickThrough for same banners can be really astonishing. You see others factors? Don't agree with my remarks? commentsents welcome!

Is worldwide equal to US?

Many of the top global companies are of US origin. When these corporation grow, globalize and start to earn more and more money from international operation - they start to question themselves. What should be the content of it's corporate.com website. There are three approaches out there:

• international traffic can be ignored - this means that www.ibm.com, www.microsoft.com are actually US websites. This creates lots of confusion for customers. My company has website for Middle East as whole covering 10 countries there. We've checked traffic coming from one of these countries - from United Arab Emirates. It turned out that 20 (twenty) times more people from UAE visit US side instead of ME one which has information relevant to them.
• company.com is worldwide bridge page - check out www.borland.com or www.bmw.com. When you enter these site you are upfront asked for the country you are coming from. This is much better solution especially if you give option to remember your choice. This way you make sure that people sites that are relevant for them.
• company.com is truly worldwide site - this is most popular with big companies of international (especially European) origin. Check out www.nokia.com or www.siemens.com. This solution I like most. You will find your relevant information there and wherever you access information that are country dependent - you will need to decide - which country you are interested in.

Lets keep in mind global traffic that might be misled. Especially from small countries where people might not be sure which company site is relevant for them.