I'm beginning to get interested in creating forums, so I'm wondering, how do forums rank in Google SERPS. Are they as easily optimized as a simple blog can be? Can they possibly be even easier to rank? Also, I can't seem to find ways to optimize forums, I'd be getting Vbulletin. Anyway, how can you optimize them?
Good forum will automatically followed by many users an the reutauion will be increased automatically. Just get you community to run the forum, then spread it using word of mouth.
if you thinking of creating forum than i think you need good community because in forum marketing is gone by it people and people traffic its ranking grow automatically.
Then I would highly advise you to get over to Taree Internet SEO Forum and check out what the admin has done there. the forum is part of his SEO strategy and they've been loitering around in top 20-30 for "SEO" for as long as I can remember, and was as high as #4 while he was trying. theres even a thread here where he explains the custom forum mods he's done.
As a small forum owner it will be probably difficult for you to rank high for competitive keywords like "webmaster forum" and similar. But there is great potential in long tail keywords. Just make sure that you have many topics in your forum, the URLs are in format like forum.tld/topic-title.php and that the forum members write something unique and not just copy and paste topics from other forums (it may be problem of bad paid posters). Than unique topic titles = unique long tail keywords. The more such topics you will have the more visitors from SE's you can expect.
If your forum has great users then you will have some great posts in your forums. Then your forum will rank in google because of the posts. Forums users are also loyal and visit the forums again and again. So when building forums get good users to post at first.
My Anti-cellulite Forum ranks pretty well for different cellulite-related keywords, although the forum is very new.
Google has no problem indexing dynamic URL's now. Just be sure you have an automatic sitemap writer mod and topic titles as page titles and Google will do the rest when given good, original content.