The invention provides a magnetic recording medium comprising a substrate of a nonmagnetic material bearing a thin magnetic layer with perpendicular anistropy. The magnetic thin layer comprises alternate layers of Pd and Co. The signal-to-noise ratio upon reading the stored information is considerably improved in that the thicknesses of the individual layers of Pd are between 0.2 and 2.0 nm and that the individual layers of Co consist of at least one monolayer of Co atoms and have thicknesses which are smaller than 0.3 nm.The thin magnet layer may be manufactured, for example, by electron beam vacuum vapor deposition of the individual layers of Pd and Co.