As far as allowing your labels to pop out, I use Illustrator, and a trick I use there is to add an extra stroke to the text, then move the added stroke beneath the text and make it white (or whatever background color you are working with, a lot of the stuff I do is Black & White so White is usually what I use). Then I adjust the point size of the new white stroke for the scale of the map (If the map is excessively large and needs to be shrunk down for printing later on the page, you'll need a larger point size to see it in the overall work).

The "outer glow" idea is a good one though Keith, I'll have to keep that in mind for future reference.