Selected mapping (SLM) is a promising distortionless technique for controlling the high peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems. In SLM, phase sequence selection plays an important role for efficient PAPR reduction. Although some phase sequence sets have been proposed in past studies, we show that an optimal selection is still desired for the phase sequences from the same set. Therefore, this letter develops a measureable phase sequence selection criterion to optimally select the phase sequences from both the same and different sets, so as to achieve near optimum PAPR reduction performance in SLM-OFDM systems.