In my experience, keywords are definitely important, I don't see how you could say they aren't.
If you have junk keywords, you'll get ranked for junk.

I'm not talking about meta keywords, just keywords in general for your articles.

Thank you for this article.

And i would say when submit your site make sure that the directories or blogs have a do-follow on links.

Thanks again.

Good looking out on the SEO stuff for the forum search engine game. Like MacGyver, I rigged it! =)