Now a days strong backlinks are considered as a Key factor to appear on the first ranking.
Creating backlinks on good web platform makes your content trustworthy to the search engine, mainly we create backlinks to make contents to be indexed on search engine as Google, but only Dofollow web authorities allow to get indexed by google.
After indexing more and more links form other authority pages, that makes you trustworthy to the search engine and allow your visibility on the first search result.