To answer your question, offpage SEO is more important. But it shouldn't be either one or the other, you should do both.
you could do SEO purely off offsite optimisation with the use of the Google Bomb, however Google have changed that now so some on page is needed. If you do half of the SEO, do the off site, you can still get refferals, you get links and you get known!
Both are important, so do both. However, my own view is that a common mistake in SEO is to focus very heavily on off-page factors, while doing very little (or nothing) for the on-page factors. The impact of good, on-page SEO is IMHO widely underestimated. Another advantage of on-page work is that you have complete control over it. Site owners have much less control over how off-page effects are implemented. So - do both, as well as doing sustained, long-term work on producing good-quality, unique content. Howard
Without which, SEO is a waste of time. But if you actually put together good (and unique) content, you'll still have SEO work to do, but much less of it. That's not what you asked, though; off page optimization is given more weight because it's not under your control, so has a better chance of indicating quality.
Can a bike run without one wheel? same is the case here. In order to get good results you'll have to focus on both off-page and on-page optimization.
Both are important but without links your site can not rank for competitive keywords so I believe off page is the most important. On page optimisation is still something you should spend plenty of time on. Many seo's still the title tag as the top factor in search ranking ranking. The Meta description tag if written properly can help draw in extra searchers. Optimise your content to bring in the long tail – use heading- make lists – research your keywords and add content that reflects these keywords.
I would prefer off-page, better content may give you higher chances to be linked by other sites with or without doing link building.
I think off page optimization should be your first preference and then go for on page. If you done good off page optimization then you completed half of your SEO work.
I think your page's score for a search query is calculated something like: (On-site factors) X (off-site factors), so you need some of both. Off-site optimization is safer - according to M477 Cu775, Google does not reduce your ranking because of some off-site link, this is to prevent someone from hurting competitors by building bad links to the competitor's site. So if you get an off-site link, at worst you'll lose your money completely (which is possible, because Google bans certain sites from being able to pass any pagerank or anchor text in their links. On-site optimization is more dangerous because changing your pages could reduce your rankings, even get the whole site banned completely. So do it carefully.
Most balanced theory. On-page Optimization can be done one time. But Off-page is a continuous process. On the other-hand one may also benefit a lot with time to time On-page optimization by putting in valuable contents regularly.
On-Page factors are most important for Google. And with combination of Off-Page factors you can perform well in short time period. I recommend you to work on both! One more thing you can't neglect Off-Page factors, as it will also help you to rank high in Yahoo!
i think in the very early stages on page is need to be focussed bcoz it is required for just once to define and use these techniques. but over all off page is much important and need to be focussed largely and have long term effects on rankings. so both are important.
I feel onpage optimization is more important though we can't neglect any of them as we know "If the content is the king of the site then backlinks are the queen of the site". If one has a good on page factors then he/she needs to spend less effort for link building and can get into the SE visibility. If on page is weak then need to stress on off page. And if both are perfect then no one can stop u to boost up.