You need to have a good publication record (i.e., papers in journals and conference proceedings, some monographs with a prestigious publisher can also help). When you can't publish in high-impact journals/conferences, you lower your expectations and spread your papers over several journals/conferences, some _will_ publish you.
The next thing is to split up your research results over many papers in order to have many publications; differences between the papers are small (and you can reference to yourself, i.e., to the "bigger picture" of which this paper is a part of). That's btw the same with grant applications: Promise much, do only 30% and have the rest as a follow-up (grant renewal). Splitting up results over several publications and grants plus the usual academic behaviour (internal status games, academic nitpicking) delay research by 300%.
Then you can create citation cartels where you mutually reference with your colleagues.
But it's not that researchers are evil, often it's the funding source that uses those metrics (e.g., publication count) that are then gamed.