I'm nearing the end of a long rebuild of a small site (very
educational!), I'm using MS Visual Web Developer which is an ASP.NET
gizmo that can utilise vb in code behind pages to do stuff.

Anyway, so I've been maximising my site for SEO and I've renamed all
of the pages on my site (creating new pages with the same content -
roughly) and I want to insert 301 redirects in the old pages. My
questions are:

From an ASP.NET perspective:

I'm using a Master Page, I'm guessing that I add the 301s to the
individual pages that are created from the master page?

What code should I delete and what should I leave? i.e. should I
remove the Document Type Definition or leave it. See the code below,
what would you remove and where would you put the 301? (this is a page
that gets everything but the content from the master page, hence the
funny look of it. Anything placed between the <p> tags is the content.

<%@ Page Language="VB" MasterPageFile="~/MasterPage.master"
AutoEventWireup="false"

CodeFile="Default2.aspx.vb" Inherits="Default2" Title="OldPage" %>

<asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="head"
runat="Server">
</asp:Content>

<asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="ContentPlaceHolder1"
runat="Server">

<p>

Hello World</p>
</asp:Content>

I have a couple of pages that have some code behind (VB) for handling
contact forms, should I remove the aspx.vb files altogether, de-
populate them or leave them as they are (I have recreated the aspx.vb
on the new pages).

From an SEO perspective:

How long should I leave it before I remove the old pages from the root
folder

Should I have both the old pages and the new pages on the sitemap
file?

How long should I leave it before removing the old page names from the
sitemap file?

I want to get this right first time so your help would be greatly
appreciated.

Michael.

ps, if your reply is going to be a rant about faqs, don't bother.