Please could someone help me - we have devised a new website where local searches and information could be returned when customers search for information about specific countries from any country worldwide. The question is do we buy national extensions - we have it all on .com at present how would this affect search engines ratings etc should we get .eu .au .za etc etc

thankyou

If visitors to a particular search engine (let's take Google.co.uk) click the "pages from the UK" button, more .co.uks and other .uk domains come up than they would if the user had simply used "the web" button. If you are intending to market this to certain countries, then I recommend using individual country TLDs for both SEO benefit but also to benefit the visitors as they may be more used to their local domain than a .com (or expect both). That's my opinion anyway.

Dan

I think that you have to chose .com (or one from TLD) and start develop it - soon you anytime will be able to add other domains with 301 redirect.

Well it turn out that the extension was not really important.
Less than the country of the host company (ip address).