It is easy to link a word and set its target to blank so that it opens in a new tab. Most website owners want to make all external links open in a new window and all internal links open in the same tab, you can make this thing easy and automatic with the help of a plugin.

Simply install and activate Open external links in a new window on your WordPress site. Once the plugin is activated, navigate to your admin area dashboard Settings -> External Links page.

By default, the plugin makes all external links open in a new tab but on its settings page, you can type URLs that should either be forced to open in a new window or ignored. Some of the basic features of this plugin include:

1. It opens up all (or specific) external links in a new window
2. It produces XHTML Strict compliant and is search engine optimized (SEO)
3. It can can open external links starting with http:// or https:// in a separate browser window or tab
4. It handles the links client-side, which lets search engines follow the links properly
5. It becomes inactive when a browser does not support JavaScript, and hence doesn’t result any errors

If you need more advanced features, there is another free plugin called WP External Links. This plugin lets you manage all external and internal links on your website by enabling you to control icons, nofollow, no opener, UGC (User Generated Content), sponsored, and yes if links open in a new window or new tab.