Maybe you’ve heard of this so-called “mobile trend” in the Web 2.0 space. If you’re only vaguely familiar with what’s going on, let me (actually, Mary Meeker) blow your mind with these slides.

KPCB Top 10 Mobile Trends

Or if you just want a few interesting details on why you should care

• Global mobile traffic should grow 26x current rates over the next 5 years
• 40% of all tweets come from mobile devices
• 50% of all Pandora users subscribe on mobile
• Spotify’s introduction of a mobile product drove 2x conversion ratio from free to paying subscribers
• Pricing on devices and data plans are falling, creating more customers

Long story short, your company should focus more effort on the mobile space if you haven’t already. Luckily, Web 2.0 Expo speaker Melissa Clark (Siteworx, Inc.) is here to help you move your company along. In her session How Mobile-Friendly Is Your Organization’s Website?, Melissa will focus on how you can create a great mobile site, how to improve UX, and how to maintain brand consistency in the mobile space all while giving the audience great case studies on how it’s done right.

We recently spoke with Melissa about her upcoming session and what her audience can expect to learn. Read the full interview below for more.

Kaitlin: According to your session description, 40% of U.S. adults access the Internet via mobile devices. For some other countries, such as Japan, this number is considerably higher. Do you have data on how many sites have mobile versions? Are web developers catching up in any meaningful way with this shift?

Melissa: While we don’t have any definitive numbers, we spent considerable time reviewing the mobile versions of many of the world’s top healthcare, financial, government and nonprofit websites. On the whole, finance and healthcare were the best markets for serving customers through the mobile channel. How did the other industry verticals perform? Not so well. There are simply vast numbers of websites that are completely incompatible with today’s mobile browsers. And even among those sites that make an attempt at mobile optimization, most fail to maximize their potential.

Kaitlin: How can a mobile site be effectively interactive with users?

Melissa: It really comes down to figuring out what your users want and giving it to them in a simple, readily consumable fashion. But remember there’s a difference between how users want to experience the mobile site and how businesses want them to experience it. Those are two different requirements and need to be approached separately. Of course, you can’t ignore your business needs, but in order to create an effective mobile experience that users will adopt, the main emphasis must be placed on the user’s wants and desires.

Kaitlin: What do you recommend sites that rely heavily on Flash do with their mobile (in this case, iPhone) version? How do they even begin to plan for this complete change?

Melissa: There are three main keys:

1. Understanding user needs.
Simply attempting to port existing interfaces to a new screen-size may not provide users with an acceptable experience. To that end, organizations need to understand what information their users will want to consume in a mobile format and just as importantly, what information users will not be consuming via a mobile channel. Armed with this information, a user experience professional can map out the appropriate information architecture to guide users through a creative and engaging mobile experience.

2. Concise and goal-oriented visual design.
Starting with that well-planned information architecture will allow a visual design department to work toward the same goal as during the discovery phase. Ultimately, the mobile channel should usher users through a highly engaging mobile website, while constraining the number of tangential design elements that are better suited to a desktop experience.

3. Technical creativity and device support.
By the time the information architecture, user experience, and visual designs reach the technical implementation stages, all of the difficult aspects of engineering the end user experience will have been tackled. This will afford the technical team with the time to focus on a creative technical solution to separate the integration of back-end data stores from the front-end coding required to support the constantly changing landscape of mobile devices. Understanding the current state of your users’ devices is a critical piece of information for mapping out a new mobile web experience, and which devices will be supported. However, keeping your front-end programming up-to-date with the latest mobile web standards will likely be a winning strategy for the longevity of your mobile solution as new devices and mobile browsers are released into the market.

Kaitlin: How do search engines treat mobile sites differently?

Melissa: Location is given more priority to mobile searches. Search engines want to provide the best possible results, and for mobile that means location-based results. It’s important to understand that there are unique indexes geared toward mobile users, like Google Mobile, Taptu, Yahoo Mobile and Bing Mobile just to name a few. Like all search engines, these strive to produce the most relevant search results. Many times, the most relevant result is not a mobile website (at least not yet). Search engines may show non-mobile pages, and may actually format a desktop Web page to “look” mobile. Developers can avoid this by inserting an “alternate” tag on website pages to direct Google to the actual mobile pages.

Kaitlin: What are some mobile SEO best practices?

Melissa: Don’t restrict access to your mobile site (search bots are not mobile devices); create a mobile sitemap; register on Google Places, which recently unveiled a location-based recommendation engine called Hotpot; use unique titles and strong meta description; remember that site speed matters; include content for mobile users (i.e. phone numbers, address, hours of operation); make numbers “linked” so mobile users can click to call; make sure your mobile URLs are viewable on a mobile device (Google will not produce them in results unless they are compatible).

Kaitlin: What are some of the technology trends you’re seeing in the Web 2.0 space?

Melissa: We’re seeing the heavy integration of social communities into mobile platforms. For example, HTC’s new phone is heavily geared toward Facebook.

Kaitlin: What are some of the trends you’re seeing in the mobility space? What are the keys to creating a mobility friendly site?

Melissa: The competition among mobile devices is driving some of the innovative functionality we’ve been coveting for a long time, like barcode scanning. We’ll get a lot more of that (tying into geography, display, etc.). We’ll also see lower price points as Apple and Android continue to compete. And with these smaller, cheaper devices, the audience will keep growing.

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Kaitlin Pike is the Web 2.0 Expo community manager. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike. To see Melissa speak, register for Web 2.0 Expo SF now with  discount code websf11bl20 to save 20%.

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