Question about this page: http://danscartoons.com/category/banking/ which has a single word slug (banking) and asking if any knowledgeable WP aficionados can recommend whether or not improving the slug like this, will improve the SEO aspect for the page? After reading this, I am curious
You're talking about two different things. He's writing about the fact that WP uses the post name as the final part of the URL (in one of the permalink settings), whereas you're talking about the category slug. In other words, you're talking about http://danscartoons.com/category/banking/ He's talking about http://danscartoons.com/banking-financial-cartoon-67/ You could change your category slug to say "banking-cartoons", which makes sense (although since it's a cartoons site, I'm not sure how much benefit there would be in that). It's not much longer and it explains what the user is looking at when they're in the category view. Your permalink structure and post slug names are already showing keywords, as you can see from the second URL I pasted, above. As far as SEO benefit goes, I would imagine you'd have to run tests yourself to see if it helps or not. It's the sort of thing that I would be surprised if there was a negative side to, especially if it's effectively automated by the post titles ("Banking Financial Cartoon 67" being a good example). Can't imagine you getting penalised for it and hey, if it adds a little SEO kick, why not? I'm not an SEO techie, though, so I may be wrong. Hope that helps.
greatly appreciate this input of yours. For SEO sake, is it at all possible, for instance, to actually add "-cartoons" ( so it is category/banking-cartoons)at the end of that specific slug and click "update" without it discombobulating the page itself? I mean, that's all I would need to do in order to add a little more seo tweaking to a category page like that, right?
Absolutely. Assuming you're not running some kind of weird add-on that messes with everything - standard WP won't care and will update instantly (it stores category numbers, not names). If you have a test setup, do it there first, just to be sure!