This paper examines an important challenge in ultrasonic structural health monitoring (SHM), which is the problem of the optimal placement of sensors in order to accurately detect and localize damages. The goal of this study is to enhance damage detection through an optimal sensor placement (OSP) algorithm. The problem is formulated as a global optimization problem, where the objective function to be maximized is evaluated by a ray tracing approach, which approximately models Lamb waves propagation. A genetic algorithm (GA) is then used to solve this optimization problem. Simulations and experiments were conducted to validate the proposed method on a carbon epoxy composite plate. Results show the effectiveness and the advantages of the proposed method as a tool for OSP with reasonable computation time.