Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for the addition thoughts Mike. I'll check out that article and continue with the plan to see if these initial "test" redirects affect the site overall. I'll share my findings down the road...

Hi Doug, 301's are the right way to go as they pass link juice from the old domain and will preserve the traffic from existing external links. The key here is "301's" (plural). Redirect each page on the old domain to the corresponding or relevant page on the new domain and also notify in Webmaster Tools that you have moved the site to the new domain. There is some discussion of moving sites and using 301's in this SEOmoz Q&A post where I added a link to a Google Webmasters video that explains the process.