Sometimes your text will have little depth in them, as in, they blend so much into the background that you can't even read what it says. With stroke, you are simply putting a border around your text to give it more depth. Usually, you want the stroke to be 1 pixel thick and use contrasting colors. If your text is white, then use black color stroke. This will easily make your text looke quite nice and readable without much skill.

In my opinion, stroke goes very well with pixel fonts, such as Visitor, and my favorite: silkscreen. Alot of the problem is, people forget to set their text settings from Smooth to None. They will get ugly finishes after stroking text and wonder why it looks so much different from the picture on this website.

Like stroke, drop shadow strengthen's your text's edges giving them more depth. However, drop shadow is more subtle and as it implies, only darkens one side of the text... like shadows. A good thing to use with Drop Shadow is too set the blend mode to lighten, then use drop shadow. This will create a very neat and professional looking effect that blends but is also easy to read.

When there isn't much background to disturb the text, you can set both distance and size to 1, giving a pretty good professional feeling. (shown in sample)

Again, like stroke, this will bring out more emphasis in your text. Unlike stroke, this creates a balanced sized glow all around your text. Likewise, you contrasting colors. The glow will most likely be white or something similar to achieve the best effects, so try to use darker color fonts. As you can see from the sample, this isn't used as much, on in the special situations where you have very dark backgrounds.

When you can notice the outerglow, you've probably used too much... kinda like when you can smell cologne, heh. Its there solely to make the text readable, since the outer glow effect looks pretty ugly when the settings are above 5 or 6.