Using Lists in replacement of Paragraph and Header tags

Question

Researching lists, it appears they have an SEO advantage. After reading this article, particularly the section on 'definition lists', I can't help but notice that definition/description lists look very similar to a typical large body of text (header -> paragraph, header -> paragraph etc).

Obviously CSS can style the <dl> and <dt> tags as needed, so my question is:

If it gives you an SEO advantage, why isn't everyone using definition/description lists for the bulk of their online content?

Answer 1

it appears they have an SEO advantage

What should this be, a "SEO advantage"? Good web search engines try to understand the content of a page. The page author defines the structure of the content by using HTML, which might help search engines. Now, if the content contains a list, it is a very good idea to use the corresponding HTML element for lists → here you have your "SEO advantage". In the same way, you use the heading HTML elements if you have a heading in your content. And yes, these also offer "SEO advantages" … for headings, that is.

But this doesn’t mean that there is any benefit in using list (or heading) elements for content that is not a list (or a heading). Otherwise …

<ul>
  <li>Why</li><li>not</li><li>use</li><li>lists</li><li>for</li><li>words</li><li>in</li><li>sentences</li><li>?</li>
  <li>O</li><li>r</li><li> </li><li>l</li><li>e</li><li>t</li><li>t</li><li>e</li><li>r</li><li>s</li><li>?</li>
</ul>

Always use HTML elements exactly in the way they are defined in the specification. Otherwise all consumers (browsers, search engines, screen readers, …) will have a hard job.

And this doesn’t mean that it would be inappropriate to use dl in your case. It depends on your content. A dd can certainly contain p elements. But note that in HTML5 you can’t use headings in dt.

Answer 2

There is a Patented System of Document Ranking based on semantic distance between terms in a document. It covers the following aspects of lists in SEO:

• If both terms appear in the same list item, the terms are considered
  close to one another.

• If one term appears in a list item and the other term appears in header, this pair of terms may be considered to be approximately equally distant to another pair of terms that appear in header and in another of the list items.

• Pairs of terms appearing in different list items may be considered to
  be farther apart than the pairs of terms falling under 1 and 2.

Read more on lists in SEO.