I've done a couple of things tonight to try and get us "to the top" of the Google results for searches like "Southern Miss sports," "USM message board," etc.:
1) "Verified ownership" of the two domains I'm using with Google.
2) Edited the forum's PHP code to include a "meta keywords" tag with all pages. The keywords are things like "Southern Miss," "Message Board," "Football," etc.
I'm going to give it a couple days, and then re-check our position in the search rankings. "The Perch" should not be the first link returned by the Google searches I'm executing. "The Perch" is no longer the number one USM message board, and that's thanks to all of us. Getting this message across to Google is "Job One" at this point.
Don't know if anyone here has SEO expertise, or knows anyone who does, but if you do, please speak up. And if you have any ideas about how to spread the word, again, speak up! Thanks.