The research field of graded ring theory is a rich area of mathematics with many connections to e.g. the field of operator algebras. In the last 15 years, algebraists and operator algebraists have defined algebraic analogues of important operator algebras. Some of those analogues are rings that come equipped with a group grading. We want to reach a better understanding of the graded structure of those analogue rings. Among group graded rings, the strongly graded rings stand out as being especially well-behaved. The development of the general theory of strongly graded rings was initiated by Dade in the 1980s and since then numerous structural results have been established for strongly graded rings.  In this thesis, we study the class of epsilon-strongly graded rings which was recently introduced by Nystedt, Öinert and Pinedo. This class is a natural generalization of the well-studied class of unital strongly graded rings. Our aim is to lay the foundation for a general theory of epsilon-strongly graded rings generalizing the theory of strongly graded rings. This thesis is based on three articles. The first two articles mainly concern structural properties of epsilon-strongly graded rings. In the first article, we investigate a functorial construction called the induced quotient group grading. In the second article, using results from the first article, we generalize the Hilbert Basis Theorem for strongly graded rings to epsilon-strongly graded rings and apply it to Leavitt path algebras.  In the third article, we study the graded structure of algebraic Cuntz-Pimsner rings. In particular, we obtain a partial classification of unital strongly, epsilon-strongly and nearly epsilon-strongly graded Cuntz-Pimsner rings up to graded isomorphism.