SEO Title and <h1> Question

Hi!

I'd just like to ask some simple but serious questions.


1) The <titile> tag,
I realize that just about all websites have the usual Title Tag, which contains the text that appears in the browser's header.

but,
Some websites also put another title hovering over the site's main banner logo.

Please visit this page for example:
Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization - SEO Chat

And look where that site has the title:
SEO Chat™
It is over the banner.

Does that piece of text help in SEO?

Why not just do a fully Graphical Banner, instead of adding lame looking text over that banner?

I think they must have done it for some reason.




2) I read somewhere before, that the <h1> tag should be your first text in your document for SEO reasons.

How true is this?

The reason why I ask this, is because many websites have the usual menu-bar of links and information to the left side of the webpage.

You can look at that same page again:
Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization - SEO Chat

To the left of the page you should see the very long menu of links.

Many websites have these.

My site I am building has a bit of written info there, like recent site updates.

Will this hamper my SEO?
Because all of this text comes before <h1> header which is to the right side, the main part of my document.



Also, I noticed that Search Engine Optimization, Google Optimization - SEO Chat doesn't seem to have any h1, h2 or h3 tags when I viewed the page source code.

How can they rank so well if they did not include those basic requirements?

Is there some new secret to getting higher ranking that they are hiding?


Thanks for all replies and comments!
-Andrew