What you are saying here is pretty well right on the money, Black Knight. However there are some things that you can do to help move the forum along in terms of search engines.

One of the most important is links in the messages. If you have a website and/or a blog that are theme related to your forum you can and should bounce the links back and forth. Links going out of the forum get more attention for the forum than ones pointing to it.

That seems to be a bit contrary to most common SEO theory but it works. When I post a message in my forum in answer to someone's question or comment I do the best I can to add a link to one of my autoresponders or to one of my blogs or to one of my websites and what shows up more often than not is whatever was said in that message, not what I linked to. So it seems that by linking out I get more attention for the forum than linking in.

I do a lot of linking on my blogs and my websites but I've never noticed that outbound links bring me any benefit with web sites nor with blogs. While it obviously does with forums. I don't have the slightest idea why that should be true but that's what I see almost constantly.

So I'd like to know why a link to my blog for instance pointing to my forum don't get the same results as a link on my forum pointing to my blog?