What is the effect of ligatures in web, regarding SEO?

Question

All designers love ligatures but vanilla web typography just sucks. I heard of [smartypants](http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/) that solves many of thoses issues, bringing sexy quotes, gorgeous ampersands and all. It's just perfect, visually.But i'm worried about SEO. Let's say on a web page, the word `finally` becomes `finally`. Are search engines capable of indexing that word and return the page when searching for `finally` (without the ligature) ?

Answer 1

There's no need to worry about how the word "looks." If I recall, SEO is basically looking for how it's spelled. Ligatures are just glyphs that are an alternate appearance of certain paired fonts placed together. It's just more pleasing to the eye. That's basically it.