Josh Driver, a guest on the southern outdoorsmen podcast phrased it the best way I have heard, eliminate the negative terrain. Think about it from the standpoint of what deer need and how they will get from one spot to another as well as when they might use an area. You might find a white oak with a lot of feed sign but if that tree is not close to cover, the odds start going down to see daylight activity there. Big areas of mature timber with little to no ground cover are the same. If there is not a mast tree dropping, there is no reason for a deer to be there in daylight, generally speaking. Then add to that looking at what terrain and/or vegetation features are going to influence where deer travel moving from bed to food and back and how bucks will move across the landscape checking does during pre-rut and rut. There are certainly spots in negative terrain where you can kill deer, the objective though is to focus on the highest odds spots of daylight movement that condense travel for the highest odds for a shot opportunity. If I am e-scouting, I am looking for hard edges, soft edges, and terrain features. Then when I am boots on the ground scouting, I am looking at all available food and deer level cover. The more features you can stack in a spot, the better it likely will be.
The spot I hunted this weekend was an area I have never hunted before on a WMA I hunted for a long time. I applied exactly this approach. This is big "flat" river bottoms. There were 3 parallel ridges (1.5' high ish) running NE to SW that junctioned into a N/S ridge. The "high" ground is narrow high stem count thickets and at the junction was a few big nutall oaks, a couple over cups and a giant water oak. The water oak and one nutall were the 2 primary feed trees. So in this spot there was hard mast, lots of browse, multiple soft edges and multiple terrain features but the two primary feed trees were 15-20 yards apart in a 50-60 yard area. I hung on the downwind side of the nutall. Friday I had 2 different 8's come through one moving NE to SW and the other on the N/S line both passed by inside 20 yards. For the trip I had 5 different shot opps on deer inside 20 just not the type deer I was after.