Egol is correct.

your redesign has a cost, the desision is yours, what is more important, the HI or the design, only you know that.

You have links in your menu, that is enough.
as for you hierarchy, you should be ok, as a H1 is what it is, but if you don’t use a h1 SE will look for the first emphasized tag to use as a heading so its not conclusive.
Try using html5 to mark out your page.
I would use the hgroup and article tags.

<hgroup class="title">

Perth SEO Company

Local SEO Perth Western Australia

</hgroup>

Blah blah blah

It is not sure if SE's are up to date on html5 yet, but they will do so,

make sure on the page specific content is in the article tag

Good on you, some guy the other day on bing forum, wasted an hour of my time trying to work out why he could not get in bing serps, then i noticed over 1,000 keywords in the noframes tag, I was very pissed off, he must of know what his problem was, so i took an extra 5 minutes to report him.

Did you report to Bing and Google?

Many complain but few actualy bother to report spam

You should not do the same, but report the spam to both google and bing.

I think a mix of keyword text is always better., but does not have to be difference on each article

i would not get reciprocal links, Search engines look for un-natural patterns of linking, although they happan natrualy somtimes, SE's can see not only your pattern but those you have reciprocal links with.
But having said that, you are on the right track, link out on a page with low PR, include a load of links back to your own site so that you only give away a small percenatge of link juice.

Go ahead nad 301, SE see it as a canonical as index,html is not always the default page. make sure you dont have any internal links point t the .html, of you will leak link juice though the 301 un-necessary.

doing a 301 should consolidate you link juice.