I'm on par with what Joe is saying..
This is such a lengthy post to write down everything I want to write out.. But I'll post a few things. Organic SEO is dying, Google is doing more and more paid advertisements and taking spots away from free results.. At some point, I wonder if it will ever get to first page = paid results only, second page organic.. But Organic SEO is still very much alive, but it's not FREE and it's not "organic", it's more grey hat.. If you want to rank and have great SEO you'll need to shell out the $$ to do so. It's not free anymore, and there's so many competitors and other links, you have to buy your way to the top one way or another..
But on the other hand "Paid"/"Grey Hat" Organic SEO is still king. (I think that's a decent way to describe it).. But you have to know the way to do, and it's not all about having one website. There's much much more to it.
History.. Back when I ran a non-dealer website, I wanted to rank for a keyword and shelled out $2K to do so and landed on the first page. Which was fine back then I was making around $500/month back in revenue in ads. Today, if I wanted to rank for that same keyword, it would be a min of around $20K and you'd be praying to even get on page 1-3. (Mind you this is white/grey hat, I'm aware $20K in blackhat would do wonders, but it wouldn't last) Things have very much changed, SEO keeps evolving, websites keep appearing out, links keep building, algorithms keep changing.. I could go on, but that's part of it.
