Do links within a site improve rankings?

In other words, do hyperlinks(in body content) on a homepage to other pages within the site improve SE rankings?
Have a competitor who does this and they seem to be outranking us. Thanks!

Yes absolutely. Your internal linking structure is very important in your indexing and search engine results page position. Obviously not as important as the actual content on your pages or backlinks

It is why getting a sitemap and submitting it to google is so useful

There's no doubt that linking internal pages through contextual keyword links within the site provides a substantial boost to those pages in the SERPs. It's one of the reasons why Wikipedia is such a formidable force in the SERPs - their internal linking power is enormous.

Along slightly different lines. The sitemap can be useful for helping search engines locate deeper pages, but any link juice and ranking benefit from those sitemap links is minimal at best.

Thanks for the info. Time to make some changes!

I concur with the others that internal linking using contextual keyword links to other webpages on your website is equally important as getting contextual keyword links from external websites. Don't forget:

• Replace "Home" in the anchor text of the link that points to your homepage with the most important keyword of your website.
• Use the most important keyword also in the alt attribute of your website's logo if it links to the homepage.
• Try to create themed webpages and link only to the related webpages within that theme.

How much equity is on alt tags in general?