After a major blackout， the primary units of system should be restarted first. In this process， it is necessary to pick up reasonable loads to ensure system stability and improve restoration efficiency. By referring to the characteristics at this stage， an analysis is made on the main contents of load restoration and the restoration strategies in coordination with unit start-up are proposed. In view of the load restoration of the stabilizing generators， a multi-objective mathematical model is developed. According to the principle of the greedy algorithm that takes into consideration the key optimization measures， a method based on load priority is proposed to solve the problem efficiently. For load restoration during high voltage line energizing， the optimization strategy is described based on the bisection algorithm. The effectiveness is demonstrated by case studies performed on an actual black-start test system in Shandong Province in China.