Imagine you walked into a supermarket for you monthly shopping and you started by looking for brown bread. After a few minutes of craning your neck you saw a rack of white bread. Expectantly you approach it. But all there is, is white bread. You ask the attendant if they have any brown bread and they refer you to aisle seven on the other end of the supermarket. After crossing the floor to the other end you finally find your brown bread.



Incidentally next to the brown bread there is jam which reminds you that you need butter. But all that is in the vicinity are different brands of jams. On asking the attendant where you can get butter they explain, brown bread is together with jam, margarine is with white bread at aisle four , while butter is on second floor together with pasta. You ask why they arrange things so haphazardly and she explains with an irritating sense of pride that products are arranged according to how they are used together.

By this time you simply continue to shop because you have already started. And as you exasperatedly go looking for the next product in your shopping list you swear never to return. And as absurd as this scenario is, many websites have similar page to page linking.

Your website is like the supermarket floor space. Your different pages like products on the shelves and the linking structure is like the aisles. Like a well organized supermarket, you expect to find all your breads in one area as well as all your spreads in one area. Poor linking structure or what is referred to as a geeky linking will quickly frustrate your visitors and confuse SE spiders. And unlike in the supermarket where the shopper may continue shopping, hissing under the breath, online all it takes to exit is a click on the back button.

Incidentally, SEs tend to downgrade your ranking on the account of such poor structures. Test are showing that sites with poor page to page linking do poorly in SERP compared to those with good linking. But what is good linking? The arrangement of breads together with the spreads commonly used with the kind of bread seems reasonable. Unfortunately that is not how people generally shop. They prefer to get all the breads and choose, then all the spreads and choose. Arranging your web content in the same way in internet marketing and SEO is akin to being relevant. For example, a tourism website should have all content on hotel bookings together while that on game drives should be together but separate from hotel bookings. Yet these two categories of content should not link to each other directly. Technically this is referred to as siloing.