ey Diva, welcome to CSS Drive.
I know how annoying it can be for your blogto take time to get crawled, i also know that many people find it hard to index most of their pages.
You can start off with fixing your permalinks if you have not, the best link structure is usually in the form of yoursite.com/your-post to get that select the custom field in the permalinks tab, type the following wihtout spaces
/% postname %/
I would keep a text based header logo, if you want a normal banner then do that and stick the header text in between text then slap some css styling so the image overlaps it. That way google wont consider that stuffing and users see your image based logo not the ugly default header text.
Don’t worry about it not being indexed right away, sometimes it takes me 2hours, sometimes a day or two. It’s annoying. When you do make a blog post, check http://blogsearch.google.com/ It gives you how many minutes ago something is happening got posted and indexed. Usually takes a couple hours longer at most to get indexed in G.
Good luck, let me know if I can help you i ohter way!