No. You can't tell it to skip indexing the top of the page, but what you can do is use CSS, absolute positioning, to place text containing keywords at the top of your page, that is invisible to users, but visible to search engines.

Let's look at an example.

Look at these two pages and see if they LOOK any different: page1 and page2.

Page1:
http://homebusiness-websites.com/index.html

Page2:
http://homebusiness-websites.com/homebusiness-websites.html

    In any standards compliant browser they look the same.

Use your browser "view source" on page1 to see how far down you have to scroll before you get to any content. Then "view source" on page2 and you will see some keyword stuffing in a div tag that isn't visible to the user and isn't displayed in the browser. A search engine spider can see it though.

Using absolute positioning I've placed the content out of the range that the browser can display.

Did you happen to notice the meta tags for keywords and description? Google doesn't bother with these meta tags because they have been abused so much in the past. But there are other search engines beside Google. AltaVista, AllTheWeb and Teoma still take these tags into consideration, and there has just recently been launched (last week) two new META search engine crawlers that collect results from various sources and return what they deem the closest to your query. I forget the name of the first one, but the second one which I tried and like is clusty.com.

Clusty is a meta-search site, drawing its results from multiple engines and other information sources. Clustered-search technology does offer an innovative alternative for users wanting a different way to view results. Maybe it is a step ahead of the new MSN search engine. Likewise MSN added a technique for grouping, or clustering, search results by domain in order to make sure that users view results from a variety of domains rather than getting multiple Web pages from the same domain.

New search engines haven't been springing up so quickly the last couple of years since Google's World domination, but recently there are new ones emerging and I hear that some of Google's key people are quitting (maybe there is trouble brewing). As well, Microsoft is ready to give Google a "run for it's money" with its redeveloped MSN search. Justin Osmer, an MSN product manager, claims MSN Search has indexed more then 5 billion Web documents while Google's claim to fame is 6 billion documents.

Anyway, the point is — it is pretty hard to tell which way the train went by looking at its tracks so I wouldn't completely abandon meta tags yet.