Along with optimization comes content.

You would get a lot better results in SERP's and with recruiting more members if you had your site optimized and created fresh unique content as often as possible.

Forums are a great way to display content over a wide range of topics relating to your site niche. Use that to your advantage once your pages are optimized and you have started gaining inbound links from other related sites.

You should aim for one page of content per day. Once your forum hits 1,000 posts if you have followed these simple suggestions then you will see descent Google traffic and search engine ranking for your chosen keywords.

1,000 posts is just an example, but I do not believe a forum really gets popular until about the 1,000 post mark.

Keep engaging in discussions about SEO and continue to learn and you should have no problems getting those members to your site.

Oh yeah, most people do not start a discussion forum unless they already have a huge following of users or a massive email list to start getting them right away. If you start from scratch without any users to target you will have to wait until you generate enough members and posts before you start to show up well in search engines.

Good luck!

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