I've seen sites that, at the very top of the page, list out their top 5 or 10 keywords in small text just before their design & content. Does anyone know if this technique works? Does Google assume that the most important text / keywords will be the first text on a page? Thanks for your opinions.
It depends how is your html code, usually spiders see the left menu links in first but it can be changed with an html tweak. And about having keywords on the top page is not why they rank high. It's important to optimize one page with no more than 2 keywords and have them in your top content.
Browse these sites and yours with Lynx browser as that is pretty much how Google see's it. But.. I find on page keyword density, and the use of <h> tags and URL based keywords to be better at "promoting" your relevent keywords to Google then simply the text being the first words on the page. Sure, having your keywords further up the page is good practice but what i said above will outdo that factor alone.
Having your keywords close the <body> tag helps in my experience, but it is not the deal breaker. Using the right keywords and the right number of keywords in the title tag is much more important than playing with position game with on-page keywords.
they are trying to increase they index count with that method . this technique depents on your cms adn web site