From what I have seen, yes keywords in drop down menus count. It is searchable text. However, the search engines are more sophisticated and can count in-content and out-of-content keywords. I don't believe you should worry about it. But it is always worth testing. Do you currently rank for that keyword?

Is the Short Title a redirect or the actual URL? If it's a redirect then it shouldn't be a problem. You can also use canonical if you want to use the lowercase and host the other page. But that's is a sloppy solution.

I agree. Lowercase in the example above. For ease of direct typing.

But when advertising just a website URL in print offline, caps. www.BulwarkPestControl.com is easier to read than www.bulwarkpestcontrol.com.

Bots can burn through script... I don't think an extra line is  really a speed bump.

.. but yes... always fun to test things.

I really don't think it will make that much of a difference. I think the real tipping point in image optimization, other than content of the webpage, is the title and alt tags.  So your example should be

But if I had to guess... The images relevancy is probably most closely associated with the surrounding text. So I would error on the side of putting it after the H1.

I think that's a great idea Heather. When can we expect that report?

If google says not to block it then don't block it. They may not index the RSS but they can still crawl the RSS.