If you work with Sharepoint Designer, use your own page layouts and want to have them for a page in a publishing site, you have to put in some controls in order to see th page content in you custom page layout. Put in a appropriate place in you page layout ( taken from ArticleLeft.aspx):

<div>
	<PublishingWebControls:EditModePanel runat="server" CssClass="edit-mode-panel">
		<SharePoint:TextField runat="server" FieldName="Title"/>
	</PublishingWebControls:EditModePanel>
	<div class="captioned-image">
		<div class="image">
			<PublishingWebControls:RichImageField FieldName="PublishingPageImage" runat="server"/>
		</div>
		<div class="caption">
			<PublishingWebControls:RichHtmlField FieldName="PublishingImageCaption"  
				AllowTextMarkup="false" AllowTables="false" AllowLists="false" 
				AllowHeadings="false" AllowStyles="false" AllowFontColorsMenu="false" 
				AllowParagraphFormatting="false" AllowFonts="false" PreviewValueSize="Small" 
				AllowInsert="false" runat="server"/>
		</div>
	</div>
	<div class="article-header">
		<div class="date-line">
			<SharePoint:DateTimeField FieldName="ArticleStartDate" runat="server"/>
		</div>
		<div class="by-line">
			<SharePoint:TextField FieldName="ArticleByLine" runat="server"/>
		</div>
	</div>
	<div class="article-content">
		<PublishingWebControls:RichHtmlField FieldName="PublishingPageContent" 
			HasInitialFocus="True" MinimumEditHeight="400px" runat="server"/>
	</div>
	<PublishingWebControls:EditModePanel runat="server" CssClass="edit-mode-panel roll-up">
		<PublishingWebControls:RichImageField FieldName="PublishingRollupImage" 
			AllowHyperLinks="false" runat="server" />
		<asp:Label text="<%$Resources:cms,Article\_rollup\_image\_text%>" runat="server" />
	</PublishingWebControls:EditModePanel>
</div>

Comments from Wordpress.com

Renate - May 1, 2014

You want some custom content in your site and it is different from page to page. Well, I wrote how to achieve this with delegate controls. Another approach is to use PlaceHolders. Maybe you can use some existing placeholders. There are so many unused placeholders in v4.master. Like PlaceHolderLeftActions. If you use starter master pages from Randy Drisgill, you must move these from invisible panel. To create custom placeholder is very easy: Just copy an existing placeholder in the master page and name it som appropriate like:

If you want to show the page title in another part than defined in your master page just add this tag to your page layout.

<SharePoint:ProjectProperty 
    Property="Title" runat="server" />
```It must be within <asp:Content> tag

It is pretty easy to add webparts to a layout page. Just define the webparts in the corresponding Elements.xml file. Like you do in onet.xml. It works fine if you provision just a single page with this layout on a web. If you have multiple pages that use the same page layout (e.g. in WCM). The trick is to use the attribute IgnoreIfAlreadyExists in the File tag:

IgnoreIfAlreadyExists="True"

Comments from Wordpress.com

Webpart in a reusable user control « Sharepoint. Kunskap. Upptäckter på resan. - Sep 1, 2011