Todays lesson is about one of the latest technologies out there, search engine optimization, also known as "SEO". For a definition of SEO, please see http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoekmachine-optimalisatie.
A lot of people want to obtain high ranks in google in local search engines such as google.be or google.nl, or google.co.uk . The trick to being able to do this is to use a local domain name for your website. If you want to target google.be, you'd need to take a domain name with a .be extension. This is really the only sure-fire way for telling Google that the website is meant for that specific country (belgium in this case). Local SEO companies will surely confirm.
Other ways, such as including the language as a subdomain extension, will help you for lanaguege targetting but won' work as well as local domains. Imagine of you were targetting both dutch speaking people in the netherlands and belgium. Ideally, you'd need a .be and .nl website, to avoid all confusion. If have a dot.com domain with only one nl.dot.com subdomain, Google won't be able to te tell for which country the content is being targeted. You'd probably rank less well for both google.be and google.nl
So to summarize todays lesson, local domains are really important when it comes to scoring high in local search engines