Label distribution learning (LDL) is a novel machine-learning paradigm generalized from multilabel learning (MLL). LDL attaches a label distribution to each instance, giving the description degree of different labels. In many real-world applications, key labels, that is, labels with relatively higher description degrees, are preferable to be better predicted. Unfortunately, existing LDL metrics measure the distance or similarity between label distributions from a global perspective, failing to give sufficient attention to key labels. Therefore, we design a novel LDL metric, the description-degree percentile average (DPA), which simultaneously integrates both the exact ranking value and the description degree of each label. The DPA can enhance accuracy in predicting key labels. Furthermore, noting the shape characteristics of the label distributions, we minimize the variance distance between the predicted and the ground-truth label distributions, to better maintain the distinguishability of labels. Finally, we propose an adaptive weighted ranking-oriented LDL algorithm, which is more suitable for realistic LDL problems that require higher accuracy in predicting key labels. We conduct extensive comparison experiments on various types of LDL datasets. Experimental results on both traditional and newly introduced metrics demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposal.