Good animation is a very peculiar skill. I've looked into the basics, but I haven't practiced it much, so take all of this with a grain of salt.
Many 3D animation tutorials I find talk about how to make effects using the program's features. Many 2D animation tutorials talk about principles required to make good animation, instead of how to animating using your drawing medium's features. Because of this, many 2D tutorials work very well for 3D animation.
Some of the 2D features don't translate easily into 3D (stretch and squatch need lattice/ffd-boxes to make use of, which complicates things), others translate very easily (timing etc). Here's a link to an explanation of
path of action. At the end, it gives further links to other principles. Going in through all of them should give you a much better understanding of how to do things. Starting from 'arcs', 'anticipation' and 'timing'. Note that after following one link, the list of further things to look at is different.
ANTICIPATION
ARCS
EXAGGERATION
FOLLOW THROUGH & OVERLAPPING
INBETWEENS: this is handled automatically by computer, but understanding it may help understand the other terms' explanations
PATH OF ACTION
POSING: This is a more advanced skill and in 3D, will be linked with camera and lighting and such.
SECONDARY ACTION
SLOW-IN & SLOW-OUT
STRAIGHT AHEAD AND POSE-TO-POSE ACTION: basically, do you start with a basic idea and go with the flow of movements, or plan the timing beforehand. "The Adventures of André and Wally B' and 'Luxo Jr', two of Pixar's first digital animations, are given as examples. It reads like it's copy-pasted from somewhere else, actually.
TIMING
You don't have to look at these from only this one site, but it's the first one I found with a list of principles, so I pasted them here.
