There is a search engine optimization MOD in phpBB.

Installing this hack is a bit tricky, but follow the instructions carefully. Among other things, it eliminates a lot of "page-drain", removal of session ids for guest and static URLs for forums and topics.

Follow this link, download the hack and install it.
Search Engine Optimization

There are millions of articles floating around the net on SEO. Mainly for communities, Google or MSN search for them :D.

Thanks for you post. Is there anything that needs to be done to the database for optimization?

There are some things you can do serverside to optimize - such as installing Turck mmCache to cache PHP scripts. But nothing that I know of to optimize the database or anything like that, that would have any influence on SEO. Just make sure to get rid of session IDs in URLs ... and if you can, try to use static html file extensions instead of URLs w/ query strings such as ? and &.

There are some things you can do serverside to optimize - such as installing Turck mmCache to cache PHP scripts. But nothing that I know of to optimize the database or anything like that, that would have any influence on SEO. Just make sure to get rid of session IDs in URLs ... and if you can, try to use static html file extensions instead of URLs w/ query strings such as ? and &.

The MOD I mentioned does all that SEO. I can tell you that I have been getting a few more hits from google searches now since I installed the SEO MOD on my phpBB installation. :)

Basic SEO to phpbb forums includes getting rid of the SID numbers in the links. For one google doesn't like them very much and they are just ugly!

I cannot overlook to advise some seo tips for phpBB :) Feel free to refer to these tips here http://www.gandalfdir.com/forums/bulletin5.html

1. SID removal
2. Index.php removal
3. Title optimization
4. Keywords optimization
5. SEO freindly urls