Investors can find high-yielding stocks in some fairly obscure corners of the market. However, income investors often overlook one promising group. I'm talking about stocks that regularly increase their dividends, thereby providing higher yields to investors who simply sit on them.

Here's how it works. Say you bought one of my current portfolio holdings -- Johnson & Johnson (JNJ, $63.92) -- back in August 2001. At that point in time the $53.75 stock paid a $0.72 dividend -- translating to a puny 0.3% yield. Since then, however, the drugmaker has hiked its dividend at an average clip of +16% per year. Currently, the $1.32 payout equates to an effective yield of 2.5% on the original purchase price -- not to mention the +20% share price appreciation during that span.

And JNJ is by no means an isolated example. Last year, 1,745 dividend increases were announced -- +7% more than the prior year -- and the trend continues to mount. What's more, the best performing stocks over the past few months have been in sectors with the fastest growing dividend payments. 

Tech stocks are a prime example. Consider the CBOE Technology Index (TXX), a proxy for 30 bellwether technology stocks in the hardware, software, electronics, Internet and telecommunications industries. This index has soared +35% in the past two years, which compares favorably to a +22% rise in the broad-based S&P 500 Index. Meanwhile, technology stocks have boosted their dividend payouts by an average of +44% over the same period, according to PNC Financial Services Group. 

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Income investors don't typically turn to technology for yield, but that's changing. Over the past few years, with mounds of cash sitting on the sidelines, this sector has been consistently initiating and raising its dividend payouts. Microsoft (MSFT, $24.65), with its $3 special dividend last November, is a prime example, but there are others.

In today's column, I searched for the top dividend growers in the technology sector. To do that, I screened for tech companies with current yields above 2% (on par with dividend payers in the S&P) that have boosted their dividends at least +5% annually over the past three years.

Top Tech Stock Dividend-Growers

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