A Facebook promotion run by All About Vision has generated a $7,465 donation for Optometry Giving Sight.

In conjunction with World Sight Day, All About Vision asked eye care professionals to “Like” the site’s Facebook page, pledging a $5 donation for each new Like. The promotion ran for three months, September through November, and generated 1,313 Likes. All About Vision also ran a limited test campaign asking practices to link their websites to AAV, which supplemented the donations generated by Likes.

Optometry Giving Sight reported record participation in World Sight Day this year — more than double that of 2010.

Last month, All About Vision celebrated a milestone of 75 million cumulative unique visitors to the website since its launch, as tracked weekly by Google Analytics and WebTrends.  The site is expected to serve 12 million unique visitors in 2011.

All About Vision debuted on January 2, 2000 and served just over 800,000 unique visitors that year — about the same number of visitors now arriving in a three-week period.

Search engines drive the most visitors to All About Vision, and that continues to grow:  Traffic generated by Google is up 75% from what it was just three years ago.

In the years since the site’s inception, searchers have become more sophisticated and more specific:  10,315,710 search-initiated visits during the first ten months of this year were generated by 936,118 different keyword searches.

Despite the dominance of search, referring sites and direct traffic still accounted for more than 1.3 million visits so far this year.  According to Google, there are more than 1.1 million links from other domains to All About Vision, with the most popular link targets being the site’s home page, the LASIK & Vision Surgery main page, the article on ocular migraines, and main pages for Eyeglasses, Conditions & Diseases, Contact Lenses and Eye Exams.

A news story about how eye color affects a baseball player’s ability to hit on sunny days provided an opportunity for CBS News to quote All About Vision.

Last month, 2010 American League MVP Josh Hamilton claimed the disparity between his daytime and nighttime batting average could be chalked up to his blue eyes.  CBS News substantiated that theory in part with information from an All About Vision article on photophobia, or light sensitivity.

The topic has received substantial media attention, including a story this week in The New York Times.  That piece featured an interview with Dr. Donald Teig, a sports vision specialist who’s consulted for numerous professional teams and is the Sports Vision content reviewer for the All About Vision.

All About Vision Editorial Director Liz Segre has been included in the 2011 edition of Vision Monday’s “Most Influential Women in Optical.”

For the ninth annual edition, distinctions were bestowed in four categories.  Liz is included in “Innovators” for her role as “a pioneer in providing online consumer education about eye care and eye health.”  She was one of the founders of All About Vision in 1999 and was instrumental in conceptualizing and developing the site.

Read the entire special report including Liz’s profile on the Vision Monday website.

This month, All About Vision will donate $1 to Optometry Giving Sight for every new Facebook “Like,” and $10 each time AAV’s free Eye Health News Feed is added to an eye care practice’s Facebook page.

Just five “Likes” can provide an eye exam and a pair of eyeglasses to someone in a developing country through Optometry Giving Sight funded programs, which provide services to people with little or no access to eye care. Optometry Giving Sight estimates there are at least 670 million people worldwide who are blind or vision impaired due to uncorrected refractive error.

By “Liking” All About Vision on Facebook, eye care professionals can be the first to hear about eye care news and new articles that are published on the site.

The free Eye Health News Feed helps practices educate their patients via Facebook.  By keeping a practice’s Facebook page fresh and interesting, the feed encourages return visits and practice loyalty.

All About Vision served more than 300,000 unique visitors for the week ending March 12, marking a new milestone for visitor traffic.  Visitors were up slightly the following week, for a second consecutive 300,000-visitor week.

For the first 10 full weeks of the year, unique visitors are up 13% compared with the same period in 2010, and average time on page is up almost 8%.  More than five million page views were served during the period.

Educating patients about eye health topics just got easier for eye care practitioners. All About Vision has introduced a free Eye Health News Feed that practitioners can use to automatically post breaking eye care news to their practice’s Facebook page.

Each week the news feed will feature two or three patient-friendly news items on eye health topics as they are added to All About Vision. The feed will link to the full story on the site. Practices with Facebook pages can set up automatic wall postings from the feed through Facebook applications. This means practices can deliver reliable, interesting news to their patients on a continual basis without any effort or cost.

All About Vision provides complete feed instructions in its information area for eye care practitioners, or an All About Vision staff member will provide turnkey setup at no charge.

Last week, All About Vision reached a new traffic high of 12 million unique annual visitors, as measured weekly by Google Analytics. It’s anticipated that the site will finish the year with about 12.6 million uniques, which would be a 33% increase over 2009.

The site’s organic (non-paid) visitors are growing at an even faster pace: Through November, they’re up 40% over last year.

Paid traffic accounted for only about 2% of total unique visitors to All About Vision in 2010.

A look at All AboutVision’s top 50 articles indicates that in addition to a 35% overall increase in unique visitors to the site, visitors are also spending more time with articles than they were two years ago.

Year-to-date statistics for the 50 most-viewed articles on the site show a 14.5% increase in “time on page” compared with a similar period in 2008, according to Google Analytics.  Visitors spend an average of three minutes and nine seconds (3:09) on each article.

Looking beyond the most popular articles, several articles on the site generate even longer reading times.  “A Cataract Surgeon’s Personal Experience with Cataract Surgery,” by Charles Slonim, MD, was viewed an average of seven minutes and 46 seconds (7:46).  Other articles with the longest average reading times were:

Mixing Multifocal Cataract Lenses – 6:03
Q&A About Cataracts and Cataract Surgery – 5:57
Lucentis vs. Avastin for Treating Macular Degeneration – 5:54
Blade vs. Bladeless LASIK: A Debate – 5:09

All About Vision is expected to serve 12 million unique visitors this year, as measured weekly by Google Analytics.

To deliver the best possible experience to its site visitors, All About Vision recently implemented technical changes to boost page speed.  The objective was to make improvements in speed without substantially modifying the look of the site.

The result:  In testing a representative sample, pages downloaded and displayed an average of 24% faster than before the changes.

To accomplish the improvement, developers attacked on two fronts: load time – the time it takes files to get from a web server to a visitor’s computer – and render time, or the time it takes a browser to assemble those files into a properly viewable page.

Smaller file sizes, minifying files, combining files and facilitating simultaneous downloads reduced load time by an average of 26% in tested pages, and render time by 20%, for an overall 24% reduction.

The test simulated use with Internet Explorer 7 on a DSL connection.  Of site visitors in the Americas with documented connections, about 30% access the site with DSL or a slower connection, while the remainder use a faster T1 or cable connection.