I love making interesting buttons, but I stopped making them after I heard that it's better to use text links for search engine purposes. Can anyone clear this up for me.
search engine puts a lot of weight in the anchor text in a text link to figure out what type of website it is and rank it accordingly, there is an attribute 'title' and 'alt' that you can use in img tag (or you can use the 'title' in the 'a' tag as well ) to inform search engines what the image link is about.
Use the 'alt' tag with images and title them using text around them, and with text links add 'anchor' text which is brief description on the link both are as powerful if used correctly.