One-way links are links to your site from sites which do not receive a link from your site.
They send a powerful message to the search engines – that your website is so valuable or interesting or useful that other sites want to tell people about it.
Spend the majority of your link building efforts on directly requesting one-way links from other pages that are relevant to the content on your own site. A one-way link request involves sending an e-mail or making a phone call to a website owner expressing interest in obtaining a link to your website from a page on his or her website. It can be the most difficult method of obtaining links, but it is likely to produce the best results because the links are coming from handpicked sites that meet the quality criteria that you want.
Most of the sites you should be targeting when doing on-way requests should come from your competition-evaluation efforts. Target only those links that meet quality link criteria. Also, make sure you request descriptive anchor text with your link.
You can also search for relevant keywords in the major search engines and contact the owners of the top results. One of the best resources of potential on-way link requests is DMOZ.org. DMOZ lists many old and established websites whose owners normally do not sell links. Often, these owners are unaware of the value of such a link, and they may not require compensation of any kind.
www.DMOZ.org – Help build the most comprehensive human-reviewed directory of the web.
