Do some types of navigation bars work better for SEO than others? Like is it better to have the navigation on the left or right of the content or below the banner but above the content? I've seen discussion about it but never anything I'd trust.

From a search engine optimization standpoint, I am not sure what is best as far as placement of the navigation bar, but I know from a personal visual standpoint, I prefer it either centered or to the right of the screen.

From a visual point of view, it all depends on your preference, but from coding/SEO point of view, have it placed at the start, just after the body tag will definitely help.

How does that help exactly? I thought that eventually the whole the page is picked up-does having it higher in the code some how assign it a higher 'rank' or importance?

Navigation menus help optimize the internal linking structure of your website and allow pages to rank better in search engines, since all the web pages are interconnected and tell the engines what those pages are about within the links.

Since bots timeout after a certain size limit, it is alway best to place any important SEO elements, such as navigations near the top of the page to prevent it from being not indexed.

Here's an article on how search engine bots behaviour works.

If is a javascript then is bad for seo, but a normal navigation bar it should be after a <h1> header