The new Eye Safety section includes safety basics as well as topics pulled from other relevant content areas, such as Sports and Children’s Vision.

“Eye safety is important to everyone, but it’s not always something we think about,” says associate editor Gary Heiting, O.D. “By adding Eye Safety to All About Vision’s main navigation that appears on every page of the site, we hope to encourage people who initially entered the site for information about other topics to read these important safety-related articles as well.”

The site’s content about Eye Exams — a conceptually similar “preventative” topic, like Eye Safety — has generated almost 300,000 page views so far this year.

The video directory is the first of its kind in the eye care field.

Each time a new article or news item is added to All About Vision, a message is posted to All About Vision’s Facebook page. By following All About Vision on Facebook, eye care professionals can keep abreast of what their patients may be reading. It’s also a way for eye care professionals to receive a regular stream of interesting topics to use in their own patient-directed social media efforts.

While many of All About Vision’s fans are affiliated with the eye care professions and related industries, consumers with special eye care interests or needs are also connecting with All About Vision through Facebook.

Non-paid traffic comprises three areas:

• Visitors who click on natural or “organic” search engine results.
• Traffic from referring websites, such as eye care practice or media outlet sites.
• Direct navigation — people who type allaboutvision.com into their browser.

In May, 98% of the site’s traffic was non-paid.  All About Vision has served more than 5.3 million unique visitors, measured weekly by Google Analytics, in the first five months of 2010.

Sports Vision Skills covers eye dominance, peripheral awareness and other vision skills that are important for good athletic performance. This article also offers tips on improving these visual skills at home.

The ability to email a page is still available to visitors, and currently generates more than 500 emails each month.

In response to visitor feedback, font-size controls and the print button have been relocated to the page header, for greater visibility.

Of the ten most visited pages on the site, several had substantial traffic increases.  Page views of the main page for LASIK & Vision Surgery were up 58%, while the LASIK cost article was up 56%.  Conjunctivitis was up 53%, and the eyelid twitching article broke into the top ten with a 289% increase in page views.

Developed by Dr. Nikki Iravani and Dr. Brian Chou, EyeXam helps users to evaluate their vision and includes tests for color perception, astigmatism, and eye dominance. It also enables users to link to All About Vision for information on eye anatomy.

EyeXam is free and has been available at the iTunes store for two weeks. It’s currently being downloaded about 3,000 times each day.