I have a simple one page sales site but I used a ton (30ish) of layers to put it together in Dreamweaver. Since these go before the majority of my code for the page, will this hurt my chances of getting adequately crawled by search spiders and consequently rank not as well?
i dont think so. hopefully it wont. because i have several sites which are full of layers and still the spiders index ma pages. good luck mate...
Remember that search bots don't 'look' at your page like a human, the scan the source. Hopefully you have your on-site SEO sorted out.
if you send me a sample of the HTML code your page loads from maybe I can tell you, but based on your desctipion frankly I haven't the slightest clue what you're talking about. I code my sites by hand, using best practices, and although sometimes I use Dreamweaver for editing code I am totally unaware of these 'layers' and how they look in when the code is saved. I'm sorry I can't be of more help, but if you could post a link or some code I might be able to give you more help. @Website Design Perth is correct when they say that the bots look at the code, not the site visually.
there will be no problem in SEO, because google bots analyze the code of website. the keywords and other text should be relevant with website. that will work without any prob.