Adding a concrete mechanism to the “be active” answer, because it took me a while to work out what it actually means in practice 🙂
Every tag you set is a shelf you appear on, and each shelf has a Popular listing and a Newest listing. Popular is locked up by established projects and you will not win it early. Newest is winnable, and it is where people who browse a specific niche actually look. So your tag set is not decoration, it is the list of shelves you are allowed to stand on.
That makes the tag field the highest-leverage single edit on the whole page. Two days ago I went through my own project’s tags, cut three that were simply wrong (they described a style the project does not have) and added the ones that describe what it actually is. Nothing else changed, and it is now sitting at the top of the Newest listing for its main tag. Wrong tags cost you twice over: they fail to bring the right people, and they occupy a slot a correct tag could have used.
For assets specifically I would tag what a buyer would type into a search box, which is usually a requirement rather than a vibe: the content (sprites, tileset, UI, icons, SFX), the style, and above all the format or engine they need it to work in. Someone shopping for assets is filtering for “will this drop into my project”, not browsing for inspiration.
Two cautions:
Do not spam small updates to farm freshness. Scroll this board right now and it is full of people whose projects lost indexing after an update. Update when you have something to say.
Devlogs are the one form of self-promotion itch actively distributes for you - they go out to the Developer Logs feed and to your followers. A project with a live devlog feed also just reads as a real, maintained thing, which matters more than it sounds like it should.