Encoding Apostrophes in HTML

[SEO-Pump.com]

One question I have recently been pondering is that the use of apostrophes in ALT attributes and anchor text seems to cause some erratic results from the 'Fetch as BingBot' tool...  GWT doesn't color code the results so i only notice it with BingBot, although i can't necessarily tell that it causes any negative effects.  My rankings on Bing are erratic though so who knows...

Should I encode apostrophes as ' when i use them in html?  Or will it not really matter?

[Carson-Ward]

Unless you're trying to rank for something with an apostrophe in the query, it won't really matter.

If you are trying to rank for something with an apostrophe in the query, some searches with and without the apostrophe show that it matters a bit. You can just use the text ' , as both search engines have shown that they understand it. As long as it renders that way in your CMS (you can turn off images to check) you're fine.