Onpage optimization - Means you can see all changes on the spot means if you want to wrote your name on place of title then you can do and it will show effects without any questions. But offpage optimization is a results of your tricks and knowledge. because there you can not do any thing according to you you have to follow lots of rules and also have to think about your self then after you can do offpage optimization. In short Title or meta tag optimization known as on page. and link building process known as offpage optimization. Thanks Manual Submission Team
it's making your page look cool for Google, lol have a look: http://www.seoinpractice.com/make-landing-pages.html
methods include in on-page optimization Title Element META Description Tag META Keywords Tag Heading Tags Alt Attribute Hyperlinked Text Visible Copy - Content is King File Naming Directory Naming
the author obviously knows nothing, so why would you just name it without describing actions... Or you forgot to add "manage keyword density" in ... ?? sheesh!
Onpage optimization is nothing like offpage optimization. It's a completely different thing. I would suggest you to start from here: http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization
on page optimization is optimizing the site pages for SE friendly like meta tag, title des h1,h2 tags etc. off page is work on other site to get link or click to your site like Forum posting with sig, article sub , blogging etc
I believe in images rather than words A visual answer is easier to retain and understand than just words... so here is a SEO flowchart, which talks about both on-page as well as off page optimization: http://www.seotides.com/2008/06/seo-chart-2/ found it really useful....and easy to understand.
Onpage optimization is very necessary if you're tracking search engines like: Yahoo, MSN because their robots see the Onpage first rather giving preference to Offpage optimization. If you want to get top ranks in Google then it's no necessary to make hard efforts for Onpage just make strong Offpage optimization..