Diferences in SEO startegy for .com / .fr / .es / .de,....

As a perfect noob I am trying to rank personal sites to get experience.
Today I try to rank sites in US with .com and in France with .fr for low to medium KW.

Is there any difference in SEO startegy when ranking domains in France or US or Spain,....
Should we use same strategy for g00gle com than for G00gle fr or .es ?

I noticed that in france a lot of #1 ranking sites have tons of directory submissions ! Whereas is US it seems less important directories !!
Almost all frenchSEO companies only offer directory submissions. Is this a lack of imagination or a SEO reality ?

I really would appreciate any feedback from this ? Thanks

if you target in france, then try to get backlinks from tld's with .fr or from the websites are in french. That's enough.

I don't have any personal experience in ranking to Google .fr/.es/.de etc but lot of my foreign clients use same seo service to get rank in Google.com or es/fr/de and they are getting their results, so I think there is almost no difference in strategies. Backlinks from English sites can be easily obtained as compare to other languages, as English language sites are available in very large number.

Thanks

i tested my german seo strategy in hungary, and it is working well! But you cant find in hungary the similar quality links as in germany. so...

I also want to rank my site at .SE But its not working...

Looking for suggestions

SEO is all about variables - that beind said, everything helps IMHO. One of these variables is the TLD in both your domain and in your backlinks. If you are trying to rank a website in France its better if you buy a .fr domain. Also it is good and seems natural if you get backlinks from .fr domains.

Another thing which is probably important is the server. If you are trying to rank a website in France I believe you should host that website in France too. However, I am not sure if this is realy much important tho.

I think it's mostly a combination of local and international backlinks. I've been trying to figure out the ratio I should have, but local backlinks are mostly just directories and blog comments. I have seen that G will show mostly localized sites for search terms that have certain information and then international sites. At the end of the day a link is a link.

Try to search local blogs with alexa top.
Use subdomains and make targeting in GWT.
Unique articles and social bookmarks are steel important

Local backlinks with local references are most importand. Some Google offices in countries like DE and UK use more sophisticated variables than others. However, this is limited to high volume searches in most cases and does not show too much impact in low competition phrases imho.