Actually before promoting a product in tv shows, they just maintained a website but i think you don't know about this. Once the website has been launched then only they promote their product/services, because website is the main base of a business so people want to purchase they can order the...
To get a review you can post your business information in top 10 business listing sites, weather i don't know it will be a good or bad reviews will appear on it.
To increase the conversation rate in your website you have to provide a proper information to the visitors what you will do, how you will do and many more.
Classifieds is used for ads purpose where we can submit product or service based information.
Forum is mainly for discussion purpose it helps to gain more knowledge about a particular topic, simply we can say it is like a chat.
For SEO, forum is more effective.
To know your keywords ranking position you have to search a relevant keywords which is related to your website, so that you can able to find out the current ranking status.
No according to the guidelines of the search engine flash image is not an seo friendly website because search engine can't able to crawl the images, so for that purpose only we are using image alt tag, if you flash then search engine can't able to crawl the flash part..
For that just submit your images in the image sharing sites like flickr, pinterest and many more.. But don't forget to include alt tag attributes for those image which you are submitting.
I think hiding the h1 tag is not a good idea because search engine give much preferences for the H1 tag, off course it affects and may be it consider as a spam..