This method is helpful if you need to redirect on a small scale and using .htaccess or mod_rewrite are not an option. Old school META redirects can be SEO suicide. My situation when I needed to use this was when I was being hosted on an IIS server that did not allow URL rewriting. If anyone finds themselves in this position, hopefully this will be useful to you.

Create a file in your root directory called redirect.php that looks like the code posted below.

<?php

$redirect = false;
$path = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

if ($path == '/oldpath.php') {
    $path = '/newpath';
    $redirect = true;
}

$url = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
if ($url != 'www.yoursite.com') {
    $redirect = true;
}

if ($redirect==true){
    header('Status: 301 Moved Permanently');
    header('Location: http://www.yoursite.com'    .$path);
}

?>

For each URL you need to redirect from simply add another:

if ($path == '/oldpath.php') {
   $path = '/newpath';
   $redirect = true;
}

You could alternatively also use this to redirect from a www url to a non www version of your site by replacing the last two blocks with:

$url = $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'];
if ($url != 'yoursite.com') {
   $redirect = true;
}

if ($redirect==true){
   header('HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently');
   header('Location: http://yoursite.com' .$path);
}

And at the top of your default page (index.php) that you're using add the line:

<?php  require('redirect.php'); ?>

Again, the code posted "as is" is probably not the best solution if you are converting a large site as each url is listed individually, although if you are handy with regular expressions(which I am not), you might be able to tweak the code a bit to make it work for you.