Typically they are used to provide information to search engines about the structure of your website. For instance, you can give links a next
or prev
rel attribute for paginating links (links which show the next/last set of search results), or you could supply a canonical
value to tell search engines which is the default link for the page it is looking at (sometimes pages are accessible via a number of different links, and this avoids indexing of duplicate content which could hurt your SEO).
Here are couple of links from Google regarding best usage: