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Not sure that editable region tags will have a positive effect on your ranking. But there are plenty of other important places to tell search engines what your page is about ...
There are others too, of course ... there are a couple of WebmasterWorld threads around discussing this.
Having said this, relevant editable region tags don't appear to hurt site rankings.
D) Page Size:
the smaller the better. Keep it under 15k if you can. the smaller the better. Keep it under 12k if you can. the smaller the better. Keep it under 10k if you can - I trust you are getting the idea here. Over 5k and under 10k. Ya - that bites - it's tough to do, but it works. It works for search engines, and it works for surfers. Remember, 80% of your surfers will be at 56k or even less.
Every unnecessary bit of code should be avoided imho.
Amazon, Ebay (US version), Visit Scotland, all have front pages well over 100kb and plenty of traffic.
I see the reasons for having a fast to access front page, or every page in fact, but all too often the big boys ignore this design factor and it appears to do them no harm.
Many of the big players (according to the CEO of YAHOO! Germany) are experimenting with smaller sites where a big site with tons of links is replaced by a good on-site search. That's what the users want. Just a few people use ODP if they're looking for some informations on a topic, most prefer SEs like Google, ATW or all the others.