A new manifold learning method, called incremental alignment method (IAM), is proposed for nonlinear dimensionality reduction of high dimensional data with intrinsic low dimensionality. The main idea is to incrementally align low-dimensional coordinates of input data patch-by-patch to iteratively generate the representation of the entire dataset. The method consists of two major steps, the incremental step and the alignment step. The incremental step incrementally searches neighborhood patch to be aligned in the next step, and the alignment step iteratively aligns the low-dimensional coordinates of the neighborhood patch searched to generate the embeddings of the entire dataset. Compared with the existing manifold learning methods, the proposed method dominates in several aspects: high efficiency, easy out-of-sample extension, well metric-preserving, and averting of the local minima issue. All these properties are supported by a series of experiments performed on the synthetic and real-life datasets. In addition, the computational complexity of the proposed method is analyzed, and its efficiency is theoretically argued and experimentally demonstrated.