well, to be honest, according to my own experiences--
Off site SEO is just as, or more, important than than the on site SEO. This is getting your name out there in front of the masses so that you can generate traffic to your site while giving something for the search engines to see and rank your page. This is so when someone searches for your keyword you are as close to the top of the first page as possible. This page rank, or page position is all important to being seen more often than not.