SEO: How to best encode characters such as ÅÄÖ

Answer 1

I'd expect if you have a charset declaration in your file (such as <meta http-equiv="Content-type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8"> in your head section) that the webcrawler would understand the unicode characters for those letters. But really you'd have to test these out and/or ask Google.

I wonder if your inference that Google's webcrawler isn't processing the entities correctly (on the basis of what you're seeing in the webmaster tools) is actually correct; I'm not saying it isn't, but it's an assumption I'd test. I'd be a bit surprised, really, if Google's webcrawler didn't understand the entities (Å for Å, etc.), most browsers do, even in the title.

But using a proper charset is probably your best bet. Make sure the charset you declare is the one your editor and other tools are actually producing!

Answer 2

Google converts everything to Unicode internally, so use UTF-8 everywhere.

Answer 3

Google does recognise HTML entity references in search results; I'm not sure where in Webmaster Tools you're looking to get the HTML-source version you quote, and whether that's actually indicative of any kind of problem (I suspect not).

But these days there's little good reason to ever use an HTML entity reference (other than the XML built-ins <, &, "). Stick with UTF-8 encoding and just type the characters ö, Å et al directly.