Should I use unordered lists to wrap up links inside nav?

[thervfet]

Hello, I just made an account to ask this question. Is there any SEO or Semantic difference between:

<nav>
    <a href="#">LINK</a>
    <a href="#">LINK</a>
    <a href="#">LINK</a>
</nav>

AND :

<nav>
    <ul>
        <li><a href="#">LINK</a></li>
    </ul>
</nav>

Is there any benefits of wrapping a tags inside of ul / li tags?

[PaulOB]

@thervfet

Is there any benefits of wrapping a tags inside of ul / li tags?

You mean is there any semantic value in wrapping a list of links in a list

It’s accepted practice to use an unordered list and it also provides structure and hooks for styling if needed.

Historically it was an accessibility fail to have anchors next to each other as screen readers would not pause when reading out loud so all you got was a strange sounding sentence. In the list structure screen readers would pause before the list items as they knew it was a list and not a sentence.

I believe these days that screen readers are better at handling either construct but I still think the semantics of the list is more suitable.

However sometimes you have no choice and a design requires the first version in order for it to be styled as required.

I don’t think it’s a big issue either way and I have no comments about SEO as that doesn’t interest me and believe there would be little difference as there are bigger factors that would influence search ranking.

[thervfet]

Thank you so much @PaulOB ! Totally agreed.