Link color issue

I need to override the link colors, as blue and purple don't show up so well against the back background.I have added the following syntax in the custom.css file and activated it in the theme settings. It works for visited, active, and hover, but not for just plain links...

<style type="text/css">
a:link {
color: #88bb30;
text-decoration: none;
}
a:visited {
color: #f5be61;
text-decoration: none;
}
a:hover {
color: #ffffff;
text-decoration: underline;
}
a:active {
color: #88bb30;
text-decoration: none;
}
</style> 

Ideas?