The following features will make a habitat more diverse, and hence more attractive to deer. Say you lease a 200-acre woodland. Try to plant a couple of food plots or cut strips in an overgrown pasture with a bush-hog. Those 20 cleared acres will provide deer with food and edge cover. The openings also will act as staging areas where does and bucks can commingle in late summer and later during the rut.
Bucks love to rub and scrape in old logging roads.
Check aerial photos for hollows, ridge saddles, strips of timber between fields, brushy fencerows and necked-down creek crossings. Hang stands in those funnels because that is where the big boys travel and chase does. If a place has several soybean, corn or alfalfa fields or, better yet, a mix of crops that's great. But one or even two major food sources aren' t enough. The does have to eat several times a day, so they'll quickly expand their home ranges, moving a couple of miles or more to feed and carrying bucks off a property with them.