Look out for affixes. For example, the past tense of most verbs ends in -ed. And many words also begin with the prefix de- so if you’ve got a d, that’s a decent place to start building your solution around.

Ditto for s, which is the most common plural suffix.

My personal strategy is to first take stock: How many vowels and liquids (L & R) do I have; are there any weird consonants to manage? (Q, W, Z, X, V)

I try to get as many of the difficult letters as I can in my first word, then build the second word out of the easier leftovers. The anchor letters (S & D as described above, among others) are key to connecting the words.

I always tried to get the uncommon letters out of the way early. For example, if you see a J, your first word should almost certainly start with a J.