I have heard that adding hidden text and links works, but I would think that this method is so over used I would not get listed to start with.
I used to believe the same thing, but some folks around the forum have said that keyword stuffing has made a comeback, so I don't know, I guess that google's slowly getting back to its roots lol...
Regardless, I wouldn't try keyword stuffing on my main website, if you want to try this at least do it on a churn & burn project that you know you're going to lose anyway...
What are some other ways to get started?
best way to rank in google (for a newbie) that I can think of is to focus on these things:
1) focus on one (not very broad) niche and one niche only! If you intend to build a site in the pets industry, for example, try going for very specific niches like "chew toys for dobermans", or "snake breeding services", or "Asian parakeet care", etc.
Basically, find a smaller topic (unaddressed by other sites that are ranking in top 10 in that niche / broader topic) within a bigger / broader topic like pets, or dog training, or reptiles, birds, etc. and build your entire site around that topic and nothing else. Basically, have a small 10-100 pages site that only ranks for extremely relevant keywords within that topic and covers every aspect you can think of about that topic (in the case of "chew toys for dobermans" example you would cover topics like chew toys manufacturers with their pros and cons, doberman dos and don'ts, popular / good retailers for dog toys, doberman chewing habits and reasons, etc)
2) cluster these keywords around few (2-10) main categories / pillars that will make up your main content pages and which will rank and be your money pages so-to-speak
3) interlink the crap out of every single one of these pages. Since the entire site will be centered around an extremely specific niche you can interlink all of the pages without following a system because every single page will be extremely relevant to each other, so you can interlink them willy-nily (still within common sense and non-abusively, of course).
4) use schema markups as much as possible (possibly on every single one of your pages) where appropriate. I don't know how you can implement schema on your site, but I'm sure you can find a lot of tutorials about this on BHW or on YT. Just look it up!
5) keep your entire site clean, fast, intuitive, and error-free, generally speaking. Also mobile-friendly, this is very important nowadays!
