Yes definitely true. A lot of SEO works and hard effort is needed to achieve a good ranking in Google. As you said both on page optimization and off page optimization are required. At the same time people can also try with some automated SEO works. These could boost up the ranking by a better margin. An SEO tool could assist well in such case. For example a Search Engine Visibility tool is available at
www.Thewebpole.com . This tool does a lot of SEO works. some of them are,
* Easy, one-click website submission to Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Ask, AOL and many more.
* Easy one click submission to over hundreds of directories.
* Improves search engine rankings with keyword and suggested topics tool.
This tool is very simple to handle at the same time they add more benefit to ranking in Google.