In practice, positioning pile foundation on footing layout of a residential house is often based on empirical judgment and long working experiences of a designer. After the pile requirements calculated, some conditions like number of piles, spacing placement of all piles on the footing, and locations such as under columns, corner, or intersection have to be determined. Besides, the coincidence of shear and gravity centers is also another essential design consideration, which is often ignored in design practice. The present study is aimed at eliminating the horizontal torsion effects during the earthquakes occurrences by reducing the eccentricity distance between the centers of gravity and shear. The scope of present study excludes any foundation or structural related design and analysis. Recent advancement of computing capabilities of computers has made the structural analysis become a convenient tool at hand for designers. In this study, the Tabu Search algorithm was adopted as an optimization tool for pile placing on the footing of residential houses. Tabu Search algorithm was known as an efficient method for solving combinatorial optimization problems where it can find some quality solutions in relatively short running time without getting stuck in local optima. An example of footing layout design was demonstrated to show the effectiveness of the present study as a decision-making tool in design practice.