Converting a static HTML site to Wordpress

[beggers]

I've built a new site using the Church theme (on a temporary domain) but it's going to replace a simple static-page HTML site on the main domain. There are a couple of good topics about moving a WP site to a new domain, but in this case I have to figure out how to forward all the old high-ranking pages to the new WP pages. You have to do something special so Google won't drop the site entirely, right?

Does anyone have an suggestions? Is there a plugin that might handle this or do I have to try something in htaccess? I've never done this before so any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.

UPDATE: I kept searching after posting this and came across this info. What do you think?

have a site that i want to convert into a simple CMS-type site with blogging functionality. The normal static pages would be converted to Wordpress "Pages". But i obviously don't want to lose our Google rankings when the URI changes.

So for example, this current page: http://www.mysite.com/somepage1.html would eventually change to something like http://www.mysite.com/somecategory/somepage1

It's my understanding that all i need to do is add a 301 redirect in an .htaccess file, like this:

redirect 301 /somepage1.html http://www.mysite.com/somecategory/somepage1

... plus i'd add more lines for all the other page redirects.

So now when someone finds the page in Google, the user gets redirected to the wordpress URI. And eventually when Google indexes the site again, it will permanently use the new URI info instead of redirecting the user.