Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Gary,

Has your question been answered? You've received some stellar responses in this thread!

Christy

I agree! And thanks for reminding the community about to award great answers with the "Helpful Answer" status, Paul!

Going back to issues related to rel=publisher ...

Linking your brand's website to your Google+ brand page using the rel=publisher attribute (and vice versa) will verify ownership of the page, and may give your website a slight advantage in search rankings as you build up the value of your Google+ brand page. It may or may not help your brand make it into Google's Knowledge Graph (but is certainly worth a shot!), and will make you eligible for Google+ Direct. Google is also now using rel=publisher to determine relevancy. You should place the attribute on your most important page of your website (usually the home page). Do not place it on multiple pages.

I hope this helps!

Christy

Google Authorship places higher value on sites that have high quality content created by real people. Even if the brand is the content "author," an individual wrote the content. (People write content, not brands.) Google's Authorship program is proof of how much they value this, and your brand's participation in Google Authorship will help, not hurt, your brand. Encouraging authors to build up their personal Google+ profiles is key. If they contribute to other sites, that will increase their AuthorRank, which shows Google they are a trusted author, which means you want them writing for your website

My frustration is that there is no solution for collaborative pieces of content. There are solutions to give Authorship to multi-author sites. However, there are no solutions (that I am aware of) to give Authorship attribution to individual pieces of content that are co-authored. I can see this being a problem with "brand-created" content in particular (e.g., your resort guide, Paul.)

I agree with Garrett in that I would use the H1 tag to mark up a heading (e.g., an article title, not a link or image.) H1, H2, H3 tags (and so forth) are (textual) header tags, after all, by definition, and are meant to help crawlers understand how pages are organized. They are also very important in helping screen readers (often used by the visually impaired) understand how a page is organized. Not properly marking up pages can result in a very frustrating, and confusing experience for those who rely on screen readers to navigate the web. The WC3 explains how to mark up textual content in HTML very well.

While including the keyword in the H1 tag has little, if any value in terms of SEO, I think including it is good for usability -- for all users, not just those that use screen readers. When a user performs a keyword search, the search results show the keyword in the page titles. I think it confirms (for the user) that they are on the correct page (and have found what they are looking for) when one of the first things they see after clicking through to a page (from a search result) is a prominent headline containing the keyword in it.