When it comes to CSS attributes, the key one you'll want to focus on is list-style-position. Setting this attribute to "outside" can make a big difference - http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/generate.html#list-style
The explanations provided by w3 can be a bit confusing, but essentially setting list-style-position to "inside" places the marker as the first inline item in the content.
You can see a helpful example of the differences between inside and outside settings here: http://jsfiddle.net/chrisvenus/uQNPk/2/.
In general, "outside" is usually the default setting. If you're experiencing issues, it could be due to another stylesheet overriding this setting or using a reset stylesheet with different defaults than desired.
To resolve this, try adding the following code snippet to your stylesheet:
ul, ol
{
list-style-position: outside;
}
You may also need to adjust the left margin to ensure your bullets are positioned correctly.