I haven’t been featured on the frontpage, but in case it helps, my understanding on being selected is:

• Make a good game. Something people want to play, that has a good amount of polish (for indie standards).
• Make a good project page. Just by looking at it, people should feel excited, get a good idea of what your game is about, and want to play it.
• Admins look through projects, and put on the front page what they think looks good. You can try tagging Itch.io on some social media, to help with the visibility of your project, but you can only do so much.

No matter what you do, there’s no guarantee way to put your project in the front page. That’s by design, so it becomes very difficult for someone to “game the system” and make it impossible for small indies to be featured.