I'd really love to help you out with your forum's SEO and promotion, but I've been really busy with studies and all. I might hit you up if you still need one in like a month or two when I'm totally free.
A small advice; ranking gaming forums have been really tough because of competition. SEO for forums works just like any other website, except you have constant changes in content. I have some high gaming forum PR backlinks if you want. (That is if you know how to use them)
Another advice; I don't recommend hiring SEO experts when starting out. Some common successful webmaster strategies:
- Hire forum posters
- Throw out forum contests
- Reward members with achievements and prizes for post counts
Is this too long or can I at least go on with just one more tip?
When starting out with forums, you
need to have starting members. You can use PostLoop. It's a service where you can post on other peoples' forums and earn points, which can be exchanged for posts on your own forum. Or you can just buy points if you don't have time.
They make sure the posts are meaningful posts of high quality, so you don't have to worry about getting stupid one liners like "great post!" "very helpful!" and crap like that.
It's not a surprise that people's brainS somehow function automatically whether or not to sign up on a forum based on forum activity by looking at the amount of posts/threads made.
TL;DR: More starting members = more autogenerated content = more traffic. Good luck!