Breadth first traversal (BFS) is a graph traversal algorithm that begins at a starting node and explores all neighboring nodes at the present depth prior to moving to the nodes at the next depth level. It uses a queue to keep track of nodes to visit at each level. The key steps are to enqueue the starting node, dequeue nodes from the front of the queue and enqueue any unvisited neighbors, repeating until the queue is empty. BFS can be used to check if a graph is connected or not. Depth first search (DFS) recursively explores as far as possible along each branch before backtracking. It uses a stack instead of a queue.