Thank you very much Mattew.  You have been very helpful.

Thank you again.

It  is for design reasons as the designers think the H1 at the top does not look right with the overall design.

Another idea I am toying with is to remove the H1 altogether ...

No 3

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-biggest-seo-mistakes-seomoz-has-ever-made

and another article saying H1 may not be that important.

Will you advise removing the H1 tag

Thank you Matthew.

Your response is very helpful.

I seem to have only one option which is to place the  H1 tag in the footer to human eyes but when you disable CSS you will see it at the top of the page.

What is your thought on this.

Cheers

Will the H1 tag be visible to the bot if it is hidden from the human eyes using background color.

Will Google penalize my website if I hide the H1 tag using the background color so it is visible to the search engine bot but not visible to the human eye.

If I place the H1 tag in the footer (front-end location) for the human eye but at the top of the page in HTML for the bots, will the search bot still consider this as the H1 tag and rank it accordingly

Finally will you categorize this under blackhat ( I think it is not too sure)

Google should not penalize you for using .in or .ca however  like William said Google may give top priority to the .com version of your site especially because you are targeting the USA and your SEO effort will benefit the.com more than it will benefit you especially with branded names and direct traffic. Hope this helps.