This paper develops a modified tabu search with diversification perturbation operator and mutation operator to solve the mounting process optimization problem for the multi-head surface mounting machine. The proposed algorithm is based on the traditional tabu search algorithm, adopting the diversification perturbation and a mutation operator to expand the search place, and a local descent search strategy is embedded into the algorithm to optimize the feeder assignment. To verify the efficiency of the algorithm, experiments on 10 PCBs instances are executed. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm could obtain better satisfied near-optimal solutions to the mounting process optimization and better accuracy than the algorithms presented in literature, and it shows the proposed algorithm can make an improvement 15.60 % on the hyrid genetic algorithm and 2.72% on the ts-sfla algorithm in literature.