Are OPTION tags read?

I read on the site that creating a site map page is a good idea, that the TOC is very bot-friendly. A lot of the keywords for my site may not appear on the home page or are toward the bottom of the page. Therefore,would it help to create a nice user-friendly drop-down box (like Amazon does) at the top that helps people quickly jump to different parts of the site? More specifically, do the robots read these as if they are in the body of the page? or do they penalize you because they are not part of normal text? Please see the short example below (assume that I have metatags similar to keywords in the title):

<HTML><HEAD>
<TITLE>Counseling for Stress, Anger, Depression, and ADD</TITLE></HEAD>
<BODY>
<FORM method="post" action="/">
<SELECT name="coolselect">
<OPTION value="stress">Stress
<OPTION value="anger">Anger
<OPTION value="depression">Depression
<OPTION value="ADD">ADD
</SELECT>
<INPUT type="submit" value="Go">
</FORM>
Welcome to my site .. even though I don't mention too much here about the topics in my title,
I'm hoping that the robots will think that the stuff in the options pertain to this page, as they point to very relevant links deeper in my site. Thanks for visting.
</BODY>
</HTML>

Are OPTION tags read?

Gary

Brett_Tabke

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