I think its just the same, you still use same html codes on phBB. Link building is also similar.

create a sitemap for it and submit it to
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dashboard?pli=1
http://webmaster.live.com/

Use the Webmaster Tools to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your site, submit sitemaps and view statistics about your sites.

Or you could ignore the above and do something useful instead.

Optimising won't really get you more "hits". Optimising can get you better qualified traffic and "clickthroughs". Promotion and Marketing is what will get you more traffic.

Yeah promote you forum by participating in related forum, With good post targeted forum members will often click through to check out who this poster is or what he stands behind.

I think there is a high competition as far as "forums" is concern so I think it will be more applicable to promote it instead.

if i am just looking to add the metadata into the source file on my site so it is optimized better and thus gets more targeted traffic

You're about 8 years behind if you think adding "metadata" will have any effect at all.

if i am just looking to add the metadata into the source file on my site so it is optimized better and thus gets more targeted traffic

who told you that? Its an old myth. Don't rely on robots to get target traffic. You should SEO and promote it to the right place.

I don't buy the idea of submitting it to SEs. I'd rather do other things than doing that. I suggest you gather relevant link instead. Check your url structure, error pages, anything that needs redirection and other usability issues.