forum.website.com or website.com/forum?

which would be better?

[illusionist]

also is a forum good word to use or should i use something else?

[dmorison]

Nothing wrong with the word forum; people know what it means.

Regarding the URL, the main reason that you would go with forum.website.com would be if you were hosting the forum on a different server; where forum.website.com would have a different IP address to [www.]website.com.

If you're on the same server, there's not a lot to choose between them. I would keep it simple and go with the subdirectory.

[beakertrail]

I would go with the subdirectory too. It will increase the number of pages for your site as the forum grows. If it was on a subdomain then some search engines consider this to be a seperate web site as it technically is.

Content is king (as they say) and I have heard that Google (at a conference) said it is better to build more content into an existing web site than it is to build on a seperate domain, effectively spreading the content. Bigger the better.