Thank you - and very happy to receive a longer answer than my question!
That certainly answers my basic question, and I really appreciate it.
What do you think about the more "semantic" tags of HTML5 - such as the "nav"? Surely it's a good idea to use them to help Google (and later web developers) on their way with understanding the structure of the content?
And, a related question, can and does Google read CSS files to determine structure too? It's not mentioned on the blog post you pointed me to (and thanks for pointing me to it - a very helpful article in all sorts of ways which I hadn't read.)