I recently had opportunity to read one blog post, where blogger talked about his experience about getting to digg's homepage.
His server crashed same day because he got about 40 K visitors, and his server was far from being able to handle such traffic in one day...
I saw some studies that coffee is actually healthy, for whatever reason doc's came up with :)
They claim that it becomes unhealthy after 5 cups a day (I think it's still too much) But if you drink 1-2 you will be perfectly fine.
They do count and they are still important.
What is going on here is that your forum is still new, and you need to work hard to reach first page, it will take you roughly 6 months before Google starts to look at your forum like more serious one.
Than you will start slowly advancing towards...
If you wanna give your blog at leas a tiny bit of professional touch, you will need your domain, and wordpress blog.
blogger is ok, but he needs that final touch that wordpress has to offer.
I only do push ups every morning, I am planing to start running this summer, bu I planned it last one and nothing happened... but I need to do it, this chair is killing me.
As annasshad said, they are not important as they used to be, but still they are one of the key factors in your website. They basically describe your site, and if your content match description from metas, you have done a good job, and search engines will reward it.
build content, content and more content. Remember, it must be unique and you must follow several SEO rules (you can find them all over the internet including this forum).
There is nothing more that Google loves, than a fresh content.
There is lots of factors involved in this, if you have 5K targeted visitors, who are really interested in your niche, you can have great start, but more is always better:)
site looks good, it's easy to navigate, which is very important, only thing that poked my eye is size of top banner, maybe if he is not that big it would look even better than now.
Overall design is nice, but as Mug said, get rid of the brown from footer, I would suggest you to pick some of the colors from the image, there are several hearts with different colors, try them all and see which fits best.
If you don't know how to work with photoshop, or have money for designer, you can even do this in paint (comes with windows). just insert picture, and do some spraying with spray tool on letters.
since the introduction of latest Google's algorithm, they are taking site load speed into consideration now, so having good hosting company is very important part now.
You need to submit your site to thousands of directory lists to feel the difference and some progress of your site. however there is several high valuable directories like DMOZ, Yahoo directory.... that are worth investing time (and even money in some of them).
You wont get backlink from them, and Google won't give you any credit if they find your site on those two. However, you can benefit greatly, simply by getting direct traffic, since those are site with extremely high user population.