You can use symbols as you do not only for ordering notes, I do it to organise tags. "." for project names tags, "@" for person tags, "!" for subject tags, "-" for places tags.
Given that I use symbols for other purposes, when using alphabetical sorting I like using a cero + hyphen, "0 -", but it does not work if you want to order by dates. This allows you to have 2 (or more) alphabetic sorted lists in one.