Hello! I created a new forum, www.debateplace.com. It is for debate on a variety of subjects. I am having trouble finding out how to get the SEO going on it, does anyone with an IPB know how to set up good SEO for it? Or know certain keywords to put? Sorry, I am new.
First step: research keywords and find some suitable keywords for your homepage. Likely few people search for 'debate place', but you should be able to find some kind of suitable keywords. Second step: regularly build backlinks from quality websites using your target keywords as link anchor text (be sure to vary the anchor text though). In a nutshell that's all there is to it. You need to find link building strategies that work for your specific forum though. You might want to advertise via forum signatures or blog commenting. You might also want to try press release submission, article submission, directory submission, social bookmarking, etc.
I am not familar with how IPB is setup, but you should have an index.php in your root directory. Try opening that file up in a text editor and search for <title>. The meta tags should be right below your title tag. The meta keywords tag doesn't help much at all. So don't worry too much about that tag.
Firstly start researching on keywords...make sure you use generic keywords this time as highly targetted keywords are not easy to fight with... then start link building.. then do some marketing like craiglist or backpage and adding videos into sites like youtube, and many more like such...