A typical client supplied me with a word document which I pasted into an HTML editor and started to clean up the code manually.

I have always taken out ASCII characters where possible and used simple HTML (N dashes, M dashes, apostrophes, single or double quote marks, etc) - the only thing I really allow is an ampersand (&). This is to keep the code looking clean and less bloated.

With Google supposedly getting clever by the minute I was wondering how G differentiates and would it give any benefit to the proper grammatical use of say an N-dash or M-dash or quotation marks?

Anyone had any experience here - or shall i just keep on tidying up my clients pages as before?

QUESTION 2

I was also thinking of using an ASCII star character (★) at the start of a websites homepage title tag - thereby having a star appear next to the title in SERPS - some users may think the search engine is giving it a star (?) but at any rate it should stand out in the SERPs

Now, is this a bad idea?

lookuptables.com - ASCII code lists