Welcome to the game @Dewey_Finn . You’ve hit on the key question with the game. There are many discussions about that in the first Wordle thread, when most of us started playing after @Briny_Deep brought it to our attention.
Extensive discussions there about how to start. It might be best to point you to that instead of rehashing it all again. That thread reached its limit of 10,000 posts and then the system created this one. There is some discussion here about what you ask too, but most of it is in that first thread when we all were trying to figure it out.
Many of us had good suggestions and strategies but to me one guy was especially helpful and that was @EllisDee .
So I suggest you find his posts in that first thread.
Good luck and welcome to the game!
HTH,
@Bullitt