I’m almost sure you use the tinymce editor. Problem is, it messed up. It inserted paragraphs where it shouldn’t, or maybe you tried to correct things and the editor misunderstood what you were trying to do. I think the best for you is to disable the fancy editor and use the good old one (as I do).
You could add a post counter into the loop. Eg: before the loop you set $i=0 and in the loop $i++. Then depending on the value of $i (in your case when $=1) do something with it.
I think some basic knowledge op php will come in handy later too. And for your problem, I don’t know what the output is from the get_links when returned for php use. But I don’t think it will be that hard to create what you like.
If you know nothing about php things might be more difficult ofcourse. If you plan to do more stuff like this yourself I suggest you take a crash course like the ones you’ll find on the web.