There’s a lot of tension, expectation and even anxiety in the SEO and webmaster communities these days after Matt Cutts disclosed that Google is about to act against excessive SEO sites, while no one really knows what does it mean exactly and how much is too much.

And during these tensed period, Google is choosing to feature in its Webmaster Central YouTube channel some basic SEO videos, which can yet again suggest that we are heading into something really big and the company is trying to prepare site owners for it.

While Yesterday the featured video of the day was one from back in August 2011 where Matt Cutts was discussing about meta tags, today a whole new video has been uploaded and featured. And guess what it is covering? That’s right. More basic SEO stuff…

In the video (you can watch it in full at the bottom of this post), Google’s developer programs tech lead Maile Ohye, is discussing about the most common SEO mistakes and errors for her opinion and her suggestions on how to get back on track. Let’s review Maile’s most common SEO mistakes she finds:

Not Highlighting Added Value
Emphasizing what does the site has to offer more than its competitors (in the title/description meta tag) is increasing tremendously the searchers click-through rate on the site from the search results.

Integrating SEO Into The Marketing Campaign
Treating SEO as a different part of the business marketing campaigns can cause incompatibilities between the two and even conflicts.

Trying To Solve SEO Problems With More Problems (Workarounds)
Not knowing and understanding all SEO practices can cause many optimization issues. As a good example, Maile is talking about defining correctly paginated content by using the rel=”next” and rel=”prev” markups.

Running After The Search Engines and Not The Users
This is something that Google’s search team mentioning countless times. Not to create content for the search engines (all this keywords density BS), but for the users.

Quickly Agile To New SEO Practices
Search is always advancing, progressing while adding more possibilities. Not taking advantage of these possibilities in early stage can potentially harm the site as its competitors will.

Alongside the most common SEO mistakes, Maile also has few recommendations and suggestions:

• Bring something unique to the user experience (“do something cool”).
• Make sure to include relevant keywords on the site without thinking on keyword density.
• Adding “smart” title/description meta tags.
• Sign up for email notifications of your Webmaster Tools account.
• “Attract buzz” which essentially means creating great quality content.
• Stay fresh by extending your reach for social media sites and make your site compatible for new devices.

Overall, the video is a nice rundown of important SEO issues and practices. It’s launch timing raises the question if Google is planning something serious against sites that using SEO in an exaggerated way. Here’s the video: