I came across this http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=www.digital-camera-resources.com%2Fsony-digital-camera-memory.html+&FORM=QBRE the link has a star as the first character. may be it is a good idea to attract attention, especially if your are not #1
That's pretty neat... and it does appear to be just a normal asterisk character, so it's easy enough to implement, but looks nice with that font. Not that it's particularly hard to become #1 in MSN, anyway
Yep, only work on MSN. You can use pertty much any characters in the title tag that is listed at http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/html-spec/html-spec_13.html
Are you referring to the Asterix summer? I think the big star mentioned first would ceritanly increase CTR's on search results pages. The only issue is that not everyone will have the character installed on their machine so the listing will then look a bit weird.
Haha...yes, now that I squint, I can see the difference between the "star" and the "astrick". I will happily stick to the astrick since it can be seen by everyone
I noticed today some neat figurines in the MSN SERP titles. Also I remmeber this thread http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=12427 haven't played with stars and asterics but looks like some in SEs plex doesn't likes cheap marketing tricks.
I'd worry about that too... Having said that, there are other charachers you can use... Wordpress blogs for example make great use of those little arrows. I'm pretty sure they would increase traffic.
The number 3 in Google on - casino en linea - (online casino in spanish) looks great...I'm proud because I did it (make a site: to see more) The problem is that some users don't see them and that you have to test a lot to see what works (i.e., is accepted otherwise it just don't appear like in Yahoo, try with the same keywords) in Google and in the other SE. MSN accept them all, Yahoo almost none (he accepts the 1st one in my homepage title) and for Google it depends on many factors, the way you code it, where you place it and which one you use...the most unpredictible factor is the user, many of them can't see unicode caracters.