Breadth first traversal (BFS) is a graph traversal algorithm that begins at a starting node and explores all neighboring nodes at the present distance from the node before proceeding to nodes at the next distance. 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 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 involves marking the starting node visited, recursively searching adjacent unvisited nodes, and marking nodes visited along the way.