Astro:

I do the same thing you do, and follow global conventions in link placement; making sure that menu links, if in text, are in the same areas, (top, left or right) and I always duplicate those links in a second set of links horizontally across the bottom of the page so that people do not have to scroll up to navigate to a new page.

When links occur within a block of text, it's a good idea to have the non-active link color differ slightly from the text color it's embedded in, and the active link color should be different enough from the text color to stand out obviously when the cursor is rolled over it. If you are concerned that visitors will not recognize the link, you can use css to differentiate it even further, by making it bold on rollover (some people find this effect rather jarring), or bold in all states - italic can also be used like this, as well as the underline attribute.

I believe that the internet has been around long enough that most visitors are much more sophisticated than they were even five years ago. They have visited sites with link schemes of all colors, and tend to focus more on the little pointing hand than the color of the link.

Gone are the days of building high-visibility sites using MS Word - and thank goodness, because in my view, those were some really ugly sites

Aloha,
Puamana