Forums are probably the hardest kind of content, because their success or failure depends on things beyond your immediate control - other people. The best way to start a forum is to already have a group of people to interact there. Start with a core community and others will join it.
Call in every friend you have with similar interests to start some conversations going at your forum. Without those, there's nothing to rank, nothing to join in with, and nothing to market.
Making the forums search engine friendly (accessible to spiders) will help in the long-term since this will allow your forum to draw its own traffic. Each conversation, each discussion, will act as more content in the search engines to attract new members with an interest in things discussed there.
Apart from that, the most important thing is to make people comfortable and welcome. No popup ads, few annoyances of any kind, just good content, intelligent posts, and a warm welcome.
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