SEO is very tricky, its quite hard to master it as google and other search engines keep changing their algorithms, but you can master the practices done by it.
In short there are 2 SEO's
1. White Hat SEO
2. Black Hat SEO.
etc. Just google it up and you can know how to proceed further.
A lot of it is just fire and pray. At a fundamental level, you're trying to make it easier for the bot to understand what is going on at the site and to improve the experience for the end-user.
For some, it really has nothing to do with SEO at all, like the friendly URLs.
They used to be a thing, but it never really had much to do with having that text in there for the search engines, it's mainly so that when someone copies the URL and pastes it on another site or instant messengers, the people will know exactly what it's about just by looking at it.
There are also ways to have little snippets show up on e.g. Discord when someone posts a link on there, including a more in-depth description and maybe a thumbnail. SEO is, in my opinion, more than just pitching something to Google.
I have read a lot of discussion about SEO methods to increase the ranking of the website in the search engine result. When the link of the website appears on page 1 of the search list, much more if it is in the top 5 then more likely it can get traffic from the searcher. That's the reason why website owners are now focusing on SEO work. However, the effect of the SEO work you have done can be seen tomorrow or next month and even later. In other words, there is no definite period that the effect will be seen. That's the problem of SEO specialist, they encounter difficulty when the SEO work they have done have no concrete effect yet.
SEO now is all about branding and also you want to look at the domain authority and trust rank. Those metrics can be found on on the Moz and Majestic sites, respectively.
OK, what do I mean about branding? Well, if a company is searched for by their brand name, that's a big boost now. Therefore, it would be wise to do long-term promotion of the brand, rather than simply something where you're trying to exploit an email list, or make an on-the-spot sale.
It's best to follow up with Google latest updates for good optimization techniques. Following the latest updates and applying them on your webpages will help to rank higher in Google searches.