Textual Links or Buttons:Seo dillemma

I write contents which basically are connected to one another. My readers need to visit all or some of them when necessary. Under each article, I have to provide 11 links all the time. I usually put them in html table, but recently, it started to look "ancient" and "boring" to me. I experimented with image buttons and found them to be toxic for seo. I went back to tables, but on some pages, I am experimenting with both traditional and css buttons. I am not able to say whether they are hurting my seo. The traffic and ranking haven't changed. I am not sure what will happen, but I have been reading that buttons are bad for such linking. Can anyone shed some light over it? I am lost.

You could style the links to look like buttons instead of using images... I assume you're using Wordpress, so I'm sure you'll be able to find a plugin that can do that for you

you are really going to hurt your on-page seo with image buttons, especially because each one is a http request with a named resource, slowing down your site.
You could get away with using a sprite and css to change that, but then you lose out on any benefit you would get from image names and alt tags.

The best of both worlds is to make your links look like buttons

All you have to do is add a button class to your link, so quickly here:

https://jsfiddle.net/1gjru52x/2/

Go ahead and add the right box between two style tags on your post

<style> copy paste here </style>

Then you just add class="buttonize" to your links

You can play around with a few things in that code to make things better for you:

background is rgba so that is red, green, blue, alpha (opacity)
the float is left <- may have to change that to none;
the font color is white;

You should be able to take that filddle and learn/apply it to your pages and not have to worry about onpage seo anymore

If I were you, I would come up with a creative way to use navigation text links.

Just because other people are using navigation text links in a boring way, this doesn't necessarily mean you have to do the exact same thing.

Use long tail keywords as navigation links, but create phrases out of them that grab eyeballs.

You probably would need to experiment quite a bit and run some tests, but if you do this properly, not only would you be able to push visitors easily from one page to the next, but you also get quite a bit more love from search engines doing so.

CSS buttons are the way to go. Plus that is what performs well on mobile.

Thanks everyone for the response. Yes, it seems the graphic buttons are extremely bad for seo. I am sticking to css buttons. At least the psycho girlfriend named Google is no more telling me my links are too close to each other.