When we refer to a clean URL, we are talking about a URL that can be indexed by a search engine.  This is really our goal isn't it?  The goal of SEO is to get your pages into the search engines and found by the users of search engines.  So, a main concern of the webmaster is to make certain that all of your URL's or web pages meet the acceptable criteria to get ranked.

Pitfall #1 - URLs unreadable by search engine
www.domain.com/index.asp?var1=some&var2=data  <instead>  www.domain.com/index/some/data.html

This isn't an exact science, as no search engine will tell you exactly what they are looking for, or will accept.  But in a general way, you will want to limit the number of page parameters that are shown on your pages.  Many search engines have become better about indexing the more difficult URLs but to be safe always make sure that your URLs are clean.  This problem mostly occurs with content management systems, custom designed websites, and not most websites designed with Frontpage or Dreamweaver.

Some popular URL rewriting programs are availble for both linux and windows operating systems.  One of the best is called mod_rewrite and this will work great on your Apache/Linux or Apache/Unix systems.  For some of you, this means most of the really low priced hosting acocunts out there.  On Windows hosting platforms you will need to purchase a license to use ISAPI_rewrite.  This is also a very good program and really the industry standard for URL rewriting on a WIndows server.  It costs about $100 dollars and it is well worth the price.

Pitfall #2 - Duplicate Content
Make certain that you don't put duplicate content onto your website
and that URL rewriters don't allow duplicate pages.

There are many ways that you can get trapped and into trouble with duplicate content.  I'll say that it is probably one of the most troublesome problems that a webmaster can unknowingly get into.  Especially when you start to work with programs that can modify URLs and make them more easy for the search engine to read.

Pitfall #3 - Over SEO'd your website
Concentrating too much on SEO is not good for your website.

Search engines have come a long way over the past few years and they are very advanced about what they actually know about your website.

So, keep it simple and make your site full of rich conent that your web visitors will want to read. Make sure that when you do get a visitor to your website, you actually have something that someone wants to see or read. At the basic level, SEO is really quite easy, so don't over complicate it.

Pitfall #4 - Content for the sake of Content
Having the wrong content can be very costly to your website

Having content for the sake of having content can actually hurt your website.  You should take care to make sure that your website has the complete package as your SEO it for the search engines.  It is very important that you don't just have content, but more important that your content is desired by your web visitors.

You will want to make sure that you have a good navigational structure, good content, relevant content, website theming, and many of the other important SEO items to make your site stand out.  Or at least stand out to the search engines.

So, when you start to write your website content make sure that it is readable, and that your intended visitors will find the information useful.  Isn't that easy?  Well i think so, and to get poeple to visit your website shouldn't be that difficult, should it?

Pitfall #5 - Meta tags must be Unique
The title tag, description tag, and keywords must be unique.

When you are creating your pages, please keep in mind that each page should have a unique title tag, description tag, and keywords.  You want to avoid having mulitiple pages that are about the exact same topic as well.  The reason for this is that the pages will be competing against each other for ranking.  It is best to have only 1 page for a specific topic on your website.

If you have multiple tags with the same title tags, the search engine will typically only rank or index only 1 page and essentially ignore the rest.  This isn't what you want so take the time to make sure that your tags are done right.  A title tag is very important and we talk about it frequently, as it may be the single most important way to tell the search engine what your page is about.  You can equate the title tag to a chapter head in the index of a textbook.  It is expected that the chapter heading of a book will describe in brief what the content of the chapter is about.