There is some organic way to be first ranking on the search engine page,
The procedure has changed or updated but the concept.
Yes, strong back links are a Key fact to appear on the first ranking but there are some other factors also.
Just think organic, you have to look on your content first, make sure that your content interesting, relevant and mostly Shareable.
Before we say anything. we need to dive to the depth of why a content is making, I mean the purpose. Actually, the purpose is related with visibility. A content always should be developed on specific topic with certain keywords. A quality content must need to be relevant to the topic that visitors are looking for that makes them engaged with Keywords. It must contain user awareness that will guide them properly with resourceful knowledge reflecting their satisfaction.
The credibility does matter as well as the visibility
Creating backlinks on good web platform makes your content trustworthy to the search engine, mainly we crate backlinks to make content to be indexed on search engine as Google ,
but only those who allows Dofollow links because Nofollow links never get indexed by google.
After indexing more and more links that allows you to be trustworthy to the search engine and then it makes your rank on the search result.
Hope you find it helpful and for more you can find me here.
Regards