How important is the Alexa rankings

This is one of the important numbers that I have to base in order my blog to become popular, and that is to increase my Alexa rank. This is very important than just Google page ranks and the number of backlinks, because all of what you've done is affecting your Alexa rank. My friend's Alexa rank is about more than 200,000 actually, and my Alexa rank really sucks and it's about more than 2 million. I wish I could have ranked at least 100,000 and above and that's my goal. The reason why my Alexa rank is too low even it has 500+ backlinks and PR3 blog, is that I lack most of the time through search optimisation in my own blog, but I think it's not yet too late to perform search optimising in my blog most of the time, because there's a right time for me to be successful, especially in Alexa ranking.