The flexible Alternating Current transmission system (FACTS) may play a vital role in solving various problems of modern restructured power system networks, which have to operate under highly stressed conditions because of ever increasing demand of electric power. However, due to huge capital investment, an intensive investigation is required at planning stage to select optimal location and size of these devices to acquire maximum benefit of it. In this paper, Continuous Genetic Algorithm (CGA) based method is proposed for placement of Static Var Compensator (SVC) for minimizing real power loss, load bus voltage deviations and size of SVC. As a first step, contingency ranking is performed to determine the most severe line outages by evaluating voltage performance index (VPI) for both cases i.e. for base load condition and when load is varied randomly. Thereafter, Continuous Genetic Algorithm (CGA) has been applied to solve mixed continuous-discrete optimization problem. The optimization is carried out to find optimal location and size of SVC to minimize real power loss, load voltage deviation and rating SVC. The effectiveness of the proposed methodology is demonstrated on a standard IEEE 30-bus system.