The single biggest thing that helped me speed up my queries and lower resource usage on the server was focusing on making my queries more sargable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargable

https://www.brentozar.com/blitzcache/non-sargable-predicates...

Looking up the etymology of "sargeable", I found this StackOverflow answer: https://dba.stackexchange.com/a/217983

And Google explains "The term 'sargable' is a portmanteau of "Search ARGument ABLE," formed by combining the words from a SQL database context."