Always record your vocals clean, without effects. A limiter can help stop peaking but you shouldn't be recording vocals at such a high volume anyway.
Mic placement should be around 6 - 8 inches from the microphone, use a pop filter to maintain this distance, it will also diffuse any puffs of air directed towards your microphone (I recommend either a shotgun mic which has a hyper cardioid pickup pattern or a sm58 as it has a cardioid pickup pattern). (The closer your mic is to your mouth the more bass your voice will have as lower frequencies don't travel as far as high ones, per the rules of the inverse square law).
I recommend recording your vocals in the -6db to -12db range. After which use an EQ to cut out the high and low frequencies (vocals are in the 1k range) cutting out sub bass and high freqs get rid of hiss and rumble.
After you do this I recommend using compression to boost the quiet parts of your speech patterns and squash the loud portions to make the sound more unified and normalized!
REMEMBER - No one likes their own voice in the beginning! It's normal! Your voice always sounds different when it's reverberating in your own head!
- Let me know if you have any more questions!
