In the deployment of Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) the placement of Mesh Nodes (MNs) is an important design issue. The performance of WMNs is greatly affected by the location of the MNs. As it is difficult to place the MNs in a regular pattern in the real deployment, finding the optimal locations in the deployment environment is of much interest for the service providers. For a given possible locations for the MNs and the user density in the deployment environment, we aim to find the locations of the MNs to be used that maximizes the coverage and the connectivity of the network together. Due to high computational complexity of the exhaustive searching algorithm, an efficient local searching algorithm is proposed. Numerical results show that, the local search algorithm can give close to optimal performance with much lower time complexity than exhaustive searching. © 2007 IEEE.