I feel lately, since September 2015 that SEO as we knew it is dead.
This depends on how you knew and understood SEO. There are so many conflicting opinions and stances out there. But the situation we have today has been many years in the making, and it's what Google has been striving towards. Google's stated aim has always been to present searchers with the best possible result for their queries - having the most optimised site out there doesn't necessarily fit this definition.
They're also trying to reduce the number of factors that can be "gamed" - if you will - whereas in the good old days (all of 5 or 6 years ago) simply having a good volume of links pointing to your site was enough, even evaluating a potential link is now a critical skill. One decent link can easily outweigh thousands of crappy ones, simply because the SE discounts them. Keyword stuffing, cloaking, link wheels, link networks - all of these tactics are essentially useless.
Your site is lost without Google adwords
I disagree with this - up to a point. AdWords can definitely help boost a site's visibility - bid enough for a particular keyword and you'll appear at the top of the search engines even if your site doesn't really have the potential to rank. This is worth thinking about if you consider that the amount of real estate for organic results for certain searches have been reduced quite considerably.
And the sites that occupy those top spots are generally well-known for addressing searcher queries. For example - imagine you own a hotel in Cape Town. If a guy in Europe searches for a hotel in Cape Town, is he searching for your hotel. Or is he searching for possibilities and doing comparison.
Very likely the second option.
Google tries to guess searcher intent, and tries to deliver results that answer the intended query. Which is why, for the search above, you're going to see giants like TripAdvisor, SafariNow and Booking.com occupying the top organic spots. Although even those fall below the fold simply because Google has it's own comparison tool right there in the results page.
If he was searching for your hotel, why wasn't he using your hotel's name? Most likely because its a complete unknown, or it doesn't have a strong brand presence like the Mt Nelson, and a few others I could mention. But looking at that - you're suddenly not looking at SEO anymore at all - you're looking at a hell of a lot of other factors - brand strength and perception, user satisfaction and experience ... many of which aren't online components at all.
It's a very basic example, but the principles will hold for many sites, which is why digital/online marketing - just marketing in general - has become a lot more complicated than it used to be.
Facebook's pages and general marketing potential also changed entirely unless you pay for it.
I feel the need to add here that marketing on Facebook is not SEO, but SMM. There's a fundamental difference. But - you can apply SEO techniques to Facebook pages, which will help them to rank in search engines for specific searches related to your brand.
Your comment is fair though - the organic reach of Facebook pages have been shot to hell. You'll be lucky to earn 5% of the traffic from FB pages you managed in the past.
Feels to me the Web has made a fundamental change.
What are your thoughts and opinions on this particularly SEO in 2016
SEO is one single facet of a much larger discipline - which is marketing. People might be tempted to correct me there and say online/digital marketing, which is not wrong, but unfortunately, we're no longer in a space where we can ignore offline signals if they are present.
My personal feeling has always been that marketing is an art rather than a science - the art of capturing people's attention, engaging them, getting them to trust you. Once that level of trust is established, people will search for your brand, rather than doing generic searches for products or services. This is something which Takealot has managed spectacularly well - as has Amazon, many years before them.
It might surprise you to learn this, but Amazon is one of the biggest search engines. Simply because people know them and trust them, and when shopping, know they are likely to find what they are looking for there. So they'll search there - not in Google.
SEO is NOT dead. This claim gets made every year, and it gets debunked every year. But it is part of a much larger scheme of things, which will make it seem like it doesn't matter as much. You can't ignore it though. Where the function of SEO in the past was to push up your rankings, its now more a case of making sure your site meets the minimum requirements of being able to rank. SEO is there to put you in the race, but it puts everybody else who is conscious of it in the race as well, which means looking for new defining factors that will put you ahead of the rest of the pack.
It can be anything. Awesome products, amazing service, and epic marketing campaign that gets everybody to sit up and look. But SEO by itself is not going to get a site performing like you want it to.
A final point. Forget about Page Rank. It's a completely useless metric, and has been for many years. The toolbar page rank we have access to get updated erratically, and if Google even still uses PR as a metric, they're not using the numbers we have access to.
This has turned into quite a ramble - I suspect I may have jumped around a bit. If you need any clarification on any of the points I made, I will try to do so when I have a moment to spare.
