I think you'll find that today's search engines are much more smarter than they used to be. The best way to gain rank is through the exchange of links. Find some related sites that compliment yours and see if they would like to exchange links.
Meta tag keywords seem to help but sites that have been established longer that use these same keywords will be hard to compete against. If you can think of words that are just as common but not used as much by your competition you may wish to include these words in your meta tag.
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