It's a forum for your company? Should you not attempt to optimise for your product and/or service? What does your company provide the visitor? If it's just a forum, I would strongly recommend you look at building up the community before worrying about SEO. Ensure that you have static URLs, well constructed description/title tags and build brand awareness through promotion.
The community is well built up. We're going to be a forum/blog host, as said here.
I'm pretty good at word-of-mouth promotion, but when it gets difficult is when it comes to expanding to compete against other sites.
I knew about the static URLs thing, if you mean those URLs that aren't queries with a code (i.e., 123ABC2YZX). I also knew about the well constructed description and title tags.
Okay, so you're going to want to pay attention to whatever analytical data you can get your hands on. Google's Webmaster Tools is a must-use for anyone to keep track of crawl errors, keywords being picked up and more. Check what you're ranking for and then head over to the Keyword Tool to view traffic values for relevant searches.
Find blogs and websites that will publish an article covering your new host and ask for a link within the article, for both traffic and value (possibly look at MyBB if you'll be basing on their software). Social media is also your friend. Make use for G+, Twitter, and Facebook. It's going to be difficult to compete against other forum hosts, since a large number have been established for some time.
Write content which is unique and quality, and over time people will link to your content naturally when they find your content on your site, from links on social bookmarking, and networking site.
YouTube is also a good source of traffic since it is one of the top content site which people go to for relevent content on what they are looking for, so you can make videos related to your site, and tell them to visit your site for more information.
Tutorial videos related to your forum's category/niche will be best since a lot of people watch YouTube videos to learn about a topic or to do something related to the topic like videos on http://www.youtube.com/user/expertvillage
If your videos become popular, they might also be featured in http://www.youtube.com/topics which shows the most viewed videos on a certain topic.
It's actually a general discussion forum, effectively. However, since we are a free forum/blog host, we could provide some software use tutorials and stuff.
