Both are fairly important. But you see a lot of people nowadays very worried about backlinks and not doing a good job with their on page SEO which for me is the most important thing.
many people dont know the difference between on page and off page seo On Page following points are the best way to increase your visibility in search engines *H1 tag containing your keyword *H2 tag containing your keyword *H3 tag containing your keyword *enough keywords to italize *keywords to underline *add ALT tag to it *keyword in the last sentence. and hyper linking between the posts Off Page profile backlinks forum posting articles posting bookmarking dmoz
Both on page and off page seo are important. While doing off page seo, do not build link too fast. Google will notice that and may be de-indexed your site. While doing on page seo, include the keyword you want to rank in title, content and link. But do not large number of URL versions or several URLs redirect to display the exact same web page. That will hurt your seo. I found this blog about on page seo. You can check it out.
In my opinion both are important on page and off page, on page is beneficial for crawling and indexing when off page is useful to make a rank in all the search engines. So first we have to complete on page then we have to go for of page optimization. if you are using low competition keywords then there is no need of off page optimization, if your targeted keywords are much competitive then you have to go for off page techniques!!
On-page optimisation (on-page SEO) is what can be done on the pages of a website to maximise its performance in the search engines for target keywords related to the on-page content and we are directly change keywords and and its tags. Off-page optimisation (off-page SEO) is for what we are doing here like article submission, bookmarking, directory submission and much more in off page activities. On site and off site both have equal priortiy i guess....if we are doing off page then we should do off page...then...
Well guys what i think is that on page and off both both are equally important as if you have a site but if you don't promote it nobody will come to know. However if the content on your site is not good than user will come to your site but he will not visit other page. Hence bounce rate will increase and page rank will decrease. I guess all of you will agree with me.
Both OnPage and OffPage Optimization techniques are highly necessary (after all there are not many techniques apart these). OnPage process is mostly for Search engines, OffPage is to drive more traffic from users and to gain more backlinks. Good luck
On-Page and Off-Page go hand in hand. Off page weighs more on your rankings but if you and a competitor have the same quality and quantity links then you can over throw them with better on page factors. Remember to use your keyword in the H1 tag and include your keyword in the first 100 words on each page.