And the forum is up!

[freshjiive]

First of all, although I'm very new to this site, I just wanted to say, It's so useful i'll be coming back for years.
So As my previous post stated here i've been inspired to start my own site. I bought a domain and hosting through bluehost last thursday. I was stuck on if I wanted a forum based website or blog. I decided to go with forum after some of the suggestions from users here. I 1 click installed phpBB and have it up and running. I definitely have a lot to learn about phpbb and am slowing learning my way around it. It has brought me to a few questions I was hoping to get some help with.
Right now when you go to my site, it goes directly into the forum. there is no "static" landing page, it's just the forum. Am I better having a static landing page that links to the forum for better SEO results?
Secondly i've been trying to get my keywords in the right places. I have them in the title and the website description. Having a bit of trouble finding the spot to put the in the metatag but i'm sure I can find an article on that somewhere. I've signed up for google webmaster (although not much help yet since the page is so new) and i've installed google analytics (27 unique visitors in 2 days yay)
Any one have any other suggestions that might help?
So far i've been mostly adding content. I have a few friends posting in the forums to make it look busy and i've hired a cheap freelancer to write me some articles I can post in the forums in regards to my niche.
Thanks for all the help and I hope i'm not coming off as a complete noob

 

[poweronics]

Have you done your on-page SEO?

 

[queenmery]

First of all - What is your forum about - webmaster, health, general or Admin? Can you please share your forum name?
2nd - You need not to add a static page, simply use 301 redirects.
3rd - Adding keywords to meta tag and meta description has became a tough thing for me. I am also managing a webmaster forum (I don't own that forum). I am still searching the way of adding keywords on meta tags and met description.

 

[freshjiive]

Having a bit of a problem with that to be honest. Ive added my keywords in the meta tag, titkle and website description. The keywords are also in several of the forum topics but today when iwas looking at google webmaster tools its picking up all the forum words as the keywords (users, posts, forum etc)
How can I fix this?