.the influence of cohesion as an effective parameter on the soil reinforcement efficiency and bearing capacity of footing has been studied. Also the effect of variables such as the depth of first reinforcement layer, the length of reinforcement layer, the vertical spacing and number of reinforcement layers on the footing bearing capacity have been studied. As a result, the optimum amounts of variables have been offered for obtaining the maximum bearing capacity. Then, the soil cohesion effect on the optimum parameters has been assessed. Another beneficial aspect of soil reinforcement is the reduction of the footing settlement which is due to the soil stiffness increasement. This subject has also been investigated for different reinforcement conditions.Basing on the footing model load tests, it was found that by increasing fine fraction of the supporting soil i.e. increasing the soil cohesion in a fixed compaction percentage, the bearing capacity increased while the reinforcement efficiency decreased. It was also observed that changing the type of adding clay to the testing sand (changing clay mineralogy) had no significant effect on the reinforcement efficiency. In the tests that supporting soil was reinforced only with a single layer of geogrid, an optimum embedment depth was obtained in which the footing bearing capacity reached to a maximum value. This depth was found to be 0.25B in this investigation ( B: the footing model width). This depth increased with increasing the cohesion and reached to 0.35B for cohesive frictional soils. In the tests with a geogrid layer in the optimum depth increasing the reinforcement length caused an increase in the bearing capacity, but this increase was negligible for the reinforcement lengths greater than a critical value. The critical length was found to be about 4B for the sandy soil while it was around 3B for the cohesive frictional soils. This result indicates that any cohesion increase in the reinforced soil causes a decrease in the reinforcement critical length. The results showed that regardless of the soil type, the optimum vertical spacing of reinforcement layers was found to be 0.35B. In addition, the model tests showed that in a cohesive frictional soil, the bearing capacity goes up by increasing the number of layers up to four layers. For reinforcement layers more than 4 layers there was no significant increase in bearing capacity. Moreover, an enhancement in the stiffness of the reinforced supporting soils was noticed i.e. the stiffness increased up to 3.5 times in the reinforced sandy soil and 2.1 times in one of the reinforced cohesive frictional soils with the optimum reinforcement geometry. This result clearly indicates that the soil reinforcement may significantly decrease the footing settlement. The settlement decrease was found to be more pronounced in the greater bearing pressures.