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Hey Rob,

Let's take a human angle at the h1 tag. It symbolizes "heading". Heading to a piece of information which can be an article, a blog post or company intro/product description on a website.

It's a very very common practice to give a heading to any information that we (humans) want to present. It's very natural and meaningful too as it tells our readers what to expect.

This is probably why search engines give importance to h1 tag(main heading), they are trying to think like humans do, to determine the relevancy of a certain page to corresponding search query.

Similarly alt text gives them an idea that the image is relevant to the subject talked about on the page.

So, I hope that explains. You should continue to avoid using image in h1 tag.

Write a nice compelling heading for your human visitors then, for search engine spiders, wrap it in h1 tag and use your main keyword once (if it isn't there naturally).

Hope that helps.

And if you need  a technical explanation on this, Rob, including some proof, here it is:

http://rob-hammond.co.uk/how-google-handles-alt-text-in-h1-tags

(look at the bottom what they have to say about other SEs besides google.)

also look at this, a similar question asked earlier in SEOmoz Q&A:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/do-images-work-as-a-h1

warm regards to all!

Thanks Justin,

I will try and keep more patience. I almost asked how long does google dance but I happened to look at your comment above and realized you already answered that..

"See what happens over the next few weeks and see if your ranking decreases or increases."

I don't think the changes I made, "set target" and "article submission", would bring me down 7 pages down, I guess it's Panda.

So,as you advised, I am waiting and watching.