By Fred Fuld
Posted on July 14, 2009

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.

This week's dividend stocks portfolio features Walgreen (WAG), which recently declared an incredible 22.2% quarterly dividend increase, from 11.25 cents a share to 13.75 cents a share, payable on Sept. 12 to shareholders of record as of Aug. 21. The annualized dividend is now 55 cents per share, up from 45 cents per share, giving the stock a yield of 1.5%.

Walgreen just reported a 3.4% increase in same-store sales results for June, handily beating Rite Aid (RAD), which posted a 0.6% drop. Total dividend payouts of $546 million are extremely well-covered by its operating cash flow of $3.81 billion. Its total debt of $2.35 billion is exceeded by its total cash of $2.4 billion.

Who else is buying Walgreen? For one, Arnold Van Den Berg, chairman of Van Den Berg Management, who uses a value investment approach to look for stocks that are trading at 40% to 65% below their determination of a company's current intrinsic value. Other value stocks that he own includes Colgate-Palmolive (CL), which yields 2.4%; Wells Fargo (WFC), yielding 0.9%; and EI DuPont de Nemours (DD), with a high 6.8% yield.

Another recent dividend-booster in the portfolio was Computer Services (CSVI), which declared an 11.8% increase in its quarterly cash dividend. The new dividend of 19 cents per share is payable on Sept. 25 to shareholders of record at the close of business on Sept. 1.

This provider of bank and credit card processing services recently reported an 11.3% increase in earnings on a 3.2% rise in revenues. Its $5.6 million in dividend payouts is greatly exceeded by its operating cash flow of $36.4 million. It has $7 million in total debt, with $6.8 million in cash.

Computer Services is owned by the Fidelity Low-Priced Stock Fund, a Morningstar-rated four-star fund managed by Joel Tillinghast. The fund has ranked in the top 10% of all mid-cap blend funds over the last five years. It also owns Safeway (SWY), which yields 2%; Oracle (ORCL), which yields 0.2%; and Unum Group (UNM), which pays 2%.

For more ideas, check out the Dividend-Increasers for the Week portfolio, or become a Stockpickr member and post a question to Stockpickr Answers.

At the time of publication, Fuld had no positions in stocks mentioned.