What is OnPage SEO?

OnPage SEO is usually the first step of any SEO strategy. It involves preparing or optimizing the website for the search engines. Effective OnPage optimization guarantees that the search engines will be able to classify your pages depending on what keywords the pages pertain most to.

You can partly influence this by optimizing your pages for particular keywords that are known to attract targeted and lucrative search engine traffic. Without OnPage SEO the efforts put into Off-Site SEO practices will not achieve the best results.

The optimization process comes down to three steps that need to be completed for each page that you want to rank in the search engines:

* Optimizing the HTML markup code,
* creating keyword relevancy, and
* making the pages accessible to the search engine robots.

Benefits

Credibility
Theoretically the rank you achieve in a search engine for any particular keyword has absolutely nothing to do with how credible your website is. However, the reality often shows that the average non-savvy Internet user expects the websites that appear first in their searches to be among the best and most credible.

More Search Engine Traffic
The goal of SEO is to drive organic search engine traffic. When your website's pages are optimized for specific niche keywords, also known as long-tail keywords, you will attract more traffic than if you started to optimize for a broad and highly competitive keyword.

This is a good introduction. Thanks for it!
I may add that off page seo(i.e. backlinks) are much more important than
onpage seo.

Hi,

Success of any SEO campaign largely depends on On page seo of the site, be it meta title, meta description or main contenet of the page.

Regards,
sarah_9

World Market
Calloptionputoption

The OnPage SEO items that need to include the "keyword phrase" you are aiming at are:
Title
URL
Meta Description (at least once)
H1 TAG (keyword phrase in at least one H1 tag)
H2 TAG
H3 TAG
H4 TAG
In First Hundred Words (several times)
Body (several times)
Bold and Strong (a couple of times)
Img Alt Attributes (keyword should be a part of each)
In-pointing Links: (a part of the anchor text)
Out-pointing Links: (a part of the anchor text)

Do not "stuff" the keyword phrase, write the content of the page for your visitors and not for the search engine robots.

On Page Optimization

Meta Tags
Description
Keywords
Creating Robots file
Header and footer
Creating sitemaps
Optimizing Seo content
Image tag optimization
Canonical / 404 Implementation
Keyword Density Analysis
Anchor Text
URL renaming/re-writing
Google webmaster tools
Yahoo Feed Submission
Keywords Research and Analysis
SWOT Analysis of Website
Target segmentation
Keyword research
Competitor analysis
Finding Appropriate Keywords.

It's a very enrich discussion. Thanks. I heard the term 'On Page SEO' but don't know what is it. Thanks to this post.

On-Page SEO involves the one-time changes to your site, like keywords and meta tags, page-load speed, etc. that act as a BONUS to your search engine rankings.

You cannot say that an off-page is more important,as without well-done on-page seo you will not be able to do backlink campaign.