I know there are sorters like LOOT but if you were sorting manually what is the general order you should put types of mods in? The DLC at the top of course, but large ones close to the top or at the bottom? Textures at the top or bottom? I would like to have similar mods grouped, most textures together, anything that edits soul gems together, ect

You should just use LOOT. There are no general rules you can follow to get a good manual sort. If you want to sort manually, you need to learn how to use xEdit to examine the changes each mod makes to each record so you can decide which mod should win the conflict. It's a lot of work to do that and you have to understand what you are doing.

Um. Yeah. Turija said it all.

There are some mods where their load order will be constant, and not really change, no matter how many times you run LOOT to sort them. For others it can depend on what they do, and at times even other mods that you are using that they conflict with, but a patch that is included or found elsewhere would go after both mods to make them work together.

One of these would be the Unofficial patches, of which you would either want to use the separate patches(which are not being updated any more) if you don't have all the DLC, or the Unofficial Skyrim Legendary Edition Patch, if you do have all three DLC. Either way, LOOT would sort them similarly, with the difference that the separate patches should be placed after their respective .esm, while USLEEP would come after all five of the .esm files that you would have with the Legendary version of the game, or with Skyrim and all three DLCs if bought separately on Steam.

Another constant like this would be a mod like Alternate Start - Live Another Life, which should always be last in your load order, with one exception, which is a mod that requires LAL, like the Alternate Start - New Beginnings mod.

As for other mods like texture or Mesh replacers, and anything similar, this can depend on if you are using a mod manager or not. If not then you need to be careful on how you install stuff, and at times be very aware of what you are installing, and the files it contains. If using a Mod Manager like Mod Organizer or the Nexus Mod Manager, then those can make it easier to manage mods, obviously, since they have options to manage conflicts easier. I use MO, where you don't have to install mods in a specific order, but you may need to reorder them for things to work properly, or look how you want them to in-game. You also don't have to manually delete files out of your data folder, since not only are the mods not in your data folder(but they are accessed by the game when you run it, and ONLY when you run it), you can delete mods without the need to reinstall others, since the conflicts between mods only really matter when the game runs, and files being overwritten don't actually overwrite files on your system - just that again, one file will be used over another when the game runs.

There are many other mods that can or should load after LAL. Warburgs Paper Map, DynDoLOD, Requiem and it's LAL patch, any type of merged patch, bashed or Skyproc patch, to give a few examples.