How do you make a link obvious?
Shades of blue provide the strongest signal for links, but other colors work almost as well. As always, when using color to signal information, you should provide redundant cues for color-blind users. Making unvisited links brighter and more luminous than visited links will usually accomplish this goal.
What makes a list of links easier to scan?
Not only that, they're hard to scan because there's no visual stopping point for each link. The way to make a list of links easy to scan is to bullet them.