After some Googling I found that the majority of examples of trying to open a link in a new tab from within a blog article didn't work with the Markdown engine within Hugo.
To that end I have come up with the following custom shortcode to achieve this.
Firstly create a folder named shortcodes in your site layouts folder. The name is case sensitive and yes it does have an s on the end.
Within that folder create an html file with a suitable name, for example open-in-blank.html.
The contents of the html should be as follows:
<a href="{{ .Get 1 }}" target="_blank">{{ .Get 0 }}</a>When you write your blog article and want the link to open in a new tab you should use the following syntax utilising the name of the shortcode html file you created without the file extension e.g open-in-blank:
{{< open-in-blank "Github" "https://github.com/SecuritySense/" >}}The text between the first quotes is the text that is displayed within the post with the second quoted text being the URL to open.