linking ?
 

Does link structure inside of an actual webpage count for anything in terms of getting higher ratings in SEs?

Say for example I have 5 pages, all of which are linked to each other in some form, all of which fall under the same category but they also have their own sub niches? Would this be wasting my time or something that is actually calculated by the spiders?

Makes perfect sense, allthough ther's no need to link everything together. Think about your users and what's good for them or makes sense. And i assume you dont need to have the same level of pagerank for every page to perform well. Keywords with higher competition should recieve more links and vice versa.