How to eliminate or remove category word from Wordpress category permalink URL

Mostly bloggers use WordPress software to host their blog. It is easy to install and manage. Have you noticed while surfing blog categories on WordPress Blog you get 'category' word in permalinks unnecessarily. For example...

By Default, Wordpress Category URL is

http://www.domain.com/category/web-hosting

This doesn’t looks good and not so Search engine friendly; if you are thinking of making it something like

http://www.domain.com/web-hosting

It’s pretty and comparatively more SEO friendly, You will need to remove the word “category” from the existing URL to make it look like this.

If you no more find that word important, open .htaccess file from the root directory of your blog installation and add the following line:

RewriteRule ^category/(.+)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Done! Save he changes made and all your URLs will now look like this:

http://www.domain.com/web-hosting

Note : If your blog is older then Search engines might have crawled older URL which will now show 404 error after changes so, it is recommended for newly setup blogs.