Im not an expert at getting traffic to your forum but i can throw a few tips towards you

1. It's probobally best you make your forum open to the public meaning you should make all forums,threads and posts viewable to the public (minus your private forums).

2. Try to have as much content as you possible can , all the content you have will count as "key words" basically. It's alwats nice to have popular content as when someone searches for a specific topic they might just land a link to one of your posts or threads.

3. Try to limit frames or anything like this, bots that i know of can't handle the frames and your pages(s) will have a description of "Your Browser Does Not Support Frames" or something along the lines of this.

These are three small tips . they might not be totally accurate but i find they work out nicely

I agree with jackel. You can also do some link building and advertising of the site.

To add, you can have link or banner exchange with theme related sites like yours..
And lastly optimize your fprum for search engines.. for me google can bring you good traffic

I have noticed that google and yahoo regularly visit the archive of this web site: http://www.xavierforum.com/archive/

You all make great point's and yes Link exchange is great way for traffic. Maybe this will help some people build there forums up

I saw this quote from some forum.I want you to look at it and make some comments about this.Need your help.Im a newbie.



what is the penalty he's talking about and what are the ground to be penalized?

The penalty he's talking about is getting your site banned in Google.

You can get banned if you add links or keywords with the same color as the background color of your page (so they can't be seen by your visitors, but the search engines will find them).

You can also get banned if you create multiple websites exactly as you main page. I.e. same content, design, etc...

Being penalized is being banned to google. You will no longer be index and crawled and there is no way yo reverse it. The grounds are simple, using black hat seo.