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On most websites, the only way to find related items is to search for them and hope they share common terminology. That works in VIVO too, as in searching for 'Pennsylvania', but notice when you click on any of the results, such as 'full public production', you'll see a links to other pages, including the University of Pennsylvania VIVO, that ensure relationships are pointed out and can be navigated in both directions.
Links in VIVO are automatically bidirectional unless you configure them not to be. You've see online retailers point out to you that "customers who bought this item also bought" accessories, supplies, or other items by the same author or manufacturer – a common and very effective behavioral merchandizing technique. These relationships form networks of connections that ultimately enable remarkable visualizations.
Many users arrive at websites not by typing the URL but from a search engine that delivers them to any arbitrary page in the website having the keyword or content they searched. VIVO provides explicit connections to related items to help users understand context and minimize their need to immediately conduct another search.
Structured data.
Because VIVO models data in a very granular way, it can be combined and reused more easily than web pages combining a lot of different information stored only in text format. This can be seen most readily by browsing VIVO in a linked data browser such as LinkSailor.