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First key to long battery life is to treat them well, monitoring the batteries or having a battery management system helps a great deal with this, I use a PakTrakr, it's more or less a volt meter that connects to each battery then gives you a combined read out, acting like a fuel gauge, but it also acts as a check engine light, only for your batteries and gives you a visual bar graph of your entire pack so you can see if a single battery is falling behind or getting over charged, this can be caused by a defective battery or a bad connection.
Keeping the water level in flooded batteries topped off is also key, the harder you cycle your batteries the more you have to keep on eye on the water level.
In picking out batteries choose some that are designed to be traction batteries, they tend to have heavier plates along with being deep cycle, an RV battery or trolling motor battery is going to be a deep cycle battery but it's not a traction battery and that heavy use in powering a vehicle is going to make light duty deep cycle batteries fail quicker, the most common deep cycle traction battery is the 6v golf cart battery, the only time I would go with a 12v battery is if you were running high voltage or were building a motorcycle.
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