Ranking a News website with many keywords

Hello, I admit I'm a long time lurker that tries to contribute here and there where ever I could. I been a member and reading forum posts here for years, tried different methods for different things, with varying degrees of success. The one thing that has always eluded me was trying to rank a news website. Anyone care to share their strategies for ranking website with keywords that may be constantly changing like Mashable or something like that for example. I'm trying to build up organic traffic to my blog.