Unique visitors to Consumer Guide to Plastic Surgery increased to 3.4 million in 2010, a 52% increase over the previous year, as measured weekly by Google Analytics.

Combined with the visitor traffic of Breast Implants 4 You and All About Facial Rejuvenation, two acquisitions that were re-launched by Ceatus Media Group in 2010, the company’s group of cosmetic enhancement websites served a total of 4.2 million unique visitors.

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.

Ceatus Media Group’s business model includes connecting consumers who are interested in vertical health areas with local providers of those health care services.  Generally this means funneling its portal visitors who are reading educational articles to provider directory pages on that same domain.

Now one Ceatus property, Consumer Guide to Dentistry, is embedding provider directory listings right on the article pages that are already being viewed by visitors — negating the need for visitors to make several clicks to find local practices.

By using software that detects a visitor’s Internet address, which is indicative of a geographic location, Ceatus ensures that visitors see local, relevant listings.  If for any reason the visitor’s location can’t be determined, default information on featured topics is presented.

This location detection uses the same technology that Internet users have become accustomed to on Google, which magically produces down-the-street results for generic searches like “pizza” or “plumber.”

The listings are being served on many of the site’s article pages.  Two examples are the articles about dental insurance and porcelain veneers cost.

Visitors to Consumer Guide to Dentistry were up 38% in 2010, with the site serving more than 1.8 million unique visitors, measured weekly by Google Analytics.  Of the site’s top 20 best-read articles, several registered triple-digit percentage gains:  Wisdom Teeth Removal (up 150%), Dental Veneers Cost (up 112%), Treatment for TMJ Disorder (up 576%), Oral Thrush (up 169%), and Medicare Dental Coverage (up 168%).

Unique visitors for the first full week of 2011 were up 45% compared with the same period last year.

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.

All About Vision has updated and expanded its content about eye safety and added a new Eye Safety tab to its main site navigation.

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.

Refractive Surgery News now offers a surgeon directory where each practice profile includes a video produced by Ceatus Media Group. The directory went live earlier this month and now includes 11 markets.

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

More than 1,000 Facebook users have added All About Vision to their “Likes and Interests” since AAV’s Facebook page went live about 10 weeks ago.

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.