Handy guide from the team at Sitepoint…

http://www.sitepoint.com/the-missing-guide-301-redirects-for-mac-and-pc/

Update

I kept finding the old page would appear at the end of the new page URL as a query string... which was annoying... so after some digging I found that this worked.

RewriteRule ^oldpage.html.*$ http://www.domainname.com/newpage.html? [R=301,L] 

This was found here on the Biostall site.