The paper is devoted to the calibration experiment design for serial anthropomorphic manipulators with arbitrary number of links. It proposes simple rules for the selection of manipulator configurations that allow the user to essentially improve calibration accuracy and reduce identification errors. Although the main results have been obtained for the planar manipulators, they can be also useful for calibration of more complicated mechanisms. The efficiency of the proposed approach is illustrated with several examples that deal with typical planar manipulators and an anthropomorphic industrial robot.