Dividend Stocks for the Week

By Fred Fuld

If you're on the lookout for dividend-paying stocks, you're in good company. The U.S. government is one of the biggest beneficiaries of dividends, having received $6.7 billion in preferred stock dividends through the end of June.

Jim Cramer likes them, too. Recently on "Mad Money," he said that "high-quality, dividend-paying stocks are still the single best asset class over any 20-year period."

Finding a stock that pays a dividend is easy enough. The tricky part comes in finding the "high quality" stocks with great yields. And a great indicator of a quality stock is that it increases its dividend. With this in mind, every week, Stockpickr combs through the recent dividend declarations and compiles the Dividend-Increasers for the Week portfolio.

Stockpickr has various resources available to dividend-seeking investors. There's the Answers forum, where Stockpickr members (sign up here) can ask and respond to each other's questions, and where experts such as Dave Peltier and Scott Rothbort visit regularly to pitch in their two cents. There are the Professional Portfolios, too, if you want to see which funds or big-name investors own your stock.

To read more about stocks that have recently upped their dividends, visit Stockpickr.com.