Trying to make page layout seo friendly

Moving things around like that is no longer required.  Just make sure your code is valid and semantically correct. But more importantly, have a lot of good content on your subject matter and keep adding content on a regular basis.

Your page is valid http://validator.w3.org/ but looks a little off.  Go back to keeping your div's in order.

You have no content to push things down.  Extensive testing over many years has shown that people read a page from the top left down to the bottom right.  Just like a printed page.

Most of my pages were written about  10 yrs ago from my 40 yrs as a roofer and roofing contractor. Most of the pages were at the top of the seo rankings, but  now others are doing better. I can tell they have copied my content, just rearranged the words a little.
In fact a relative told me he copied ton of articles from many sites and put google adsense
adds on the pages.
Example How to troubleshoot home electrical problems he knows nothing on fixing electrical problems
i have read where the seo robots stop after  reading a page only so far so i am attempting to put the pages contents first.

In the normal flow of my pages layout many pages the footer goes below the longest column
But in the page http://roofgenius.com/test.htm it seems to be tied to the center column only

Before the <hr> just above the footer, I would put <br clear="all" />.

the  <br clear="all" />. made no difference

http://roofgenius.com/test.htm

What you read is old.   This is a great article from a very good source http://moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization and a nice little cheat sheet http://moz.com/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet-2013-edition

Notice the emphasis is on content, human and bot usability, multi device and sharing.

Thanks Dave none of my pages are positioned absolute. This is some thing that i am experimenting with to see if I could get the content before the left nav column. Seems the only way to make this work would be to make sure the center content is more than the side columns content. In my old table based site i did it using colspan for layout.

With relative position, content 'pushes' the other content in the page flow.  With absolute position, 'flow' doesn't exist inside that container.  I have a customer who designs all his pages with 'position:absolute;' because it acts (to him) like Photoshop does.  It can be a mess to clean up after him at times.  But I've learned how to calculate the position offsets that are needed while he uses Dreamweaver to 'drop and drag' elements to where he wants them.

Not even sure if i even want to change. It would probably not make any difference in seo,
but on the other hand it would not hurt that i can see.
I figured a hack:
<div style="margin-top: 790px"></div>
<hr>
Of course most pages would not need this much margin

Thanks
padas thanks for taking the time and the links, very informative.
I had not decided to rearrange the layout, just wanted to see if it could be done
Took me about 2 months to change the old table based layout to html5
Thanks to you guys i did it
I made notes on every 160 pages for content improvement.
My most popular page has always been http://roofgenius.com/roofpitch.htm
for years I was #1 on the first page, but now have slipped.
I will try to edit pages and get back

I know the question is closed but just to add my 2 cent
Search engines are clever enough to know what is content and relevant and what is not.
Trying to jig your layout to get your content to appear first in the HTML is a waste of time provided you are marking up your content correctly. (Though you can do it by floating your content)
That means using your H1/2/3 etc tags correctly (one H1 tag to rule them all)
I'm talking about you Roof Estimating and Roofing Tips-How-to etc ;o)
(do you get the sarcasm?)

Thanks for adding that in the past i never used  the h1-5 at all. Now i see where i need to start using them.Have to read the correct way.