We all like to see rising dividend yields. And that only happens for one of two reasons: either the quarterly payout increases or the share price decreases. The first cause is typically met with shareholder applause. The second… not so much.

#-ad_banner-#Yet, temporary dips in share price can be far more effective in sending yields quickly skyward — turning a normal 2% payer into a 3% payer, juicing a 3% yield to 4%, and bumping a 5% payout to 6%, 7% or even more. And they can do so in a matter of days or weeks — expediting a process that can take years through the “preferred” route of dividend hikes.

Take SeaDrill Ltd (Nasdaq: SDRL), a former member of my High-Yield Investing portfolio that I sold back in January for a 47% profit. Since then, the stock has plunged from $40 to $22.51 at the time this article was written.

Back then, the annualized dividend of $3.92 per share was throwing off a yield of 9.8%. Nothing wrong with that. But today, thanks to market panic (and a minor two-cent hike in the quarterly payment), the yield has been driven into the stratosphere at 17.5%.

How long would it have taken investors to capture the same payout on their original cost basis through dividend hikes? Well, if you invested at $40, it would take $7.00 per share in annual dividends to attain the same 17.5% yield ($7/$40 = 0.175).

Assuming dividends grow at the same projected pace as underlying profits (5.0% according to consensus analyst forecast), it would take 12 years for dividends to reach that level.

Now, I’m not saying that we should cheer whenever a stock is cut in half from $40 to $20. And granted, this is an extreme example used for demonstrative purposes. But steep market pullbacks are going to happen whether we like them or not.

As long as the decline isn’t due to serious company-specific troubles, there can be no easier way to lock in significantly higher yields — and make your money work much harder. In this case, capturing a yield that might take 12 years under normal circumstances.

With that in mind, I went out in search of quality stocks whose dividend yields have gone from good to great over the past three months thanks to this broad market pullback. I eliminated penny stocks with market caps below $1 billion, as well as stocks with negative earnings growth.

Here are some of the more noteworthy finalists.

Risks To Consider: This is just a stock screen, not a list of approved portfolio candidates. None of these stocks have been fully researched. But with dividend yields that are now 33% to 50% higher than they were three months ago, further analysis could be worthwhile.

Action To Take –> Ordinarily, risk-and-reward go hand-in-hand. So if you put two otherwise similar options side by side, choosing an 11.0% yield rather than 7.5% typically requires an investment in a company with less financial stability and/or weaker cash flow outlook than its peers.

But when indiscriminate selling takes hold, there is no corresponding increase in risk to get a much higher payout — CVR Partners is the same company today that it was 90 days ago. But thanks to the pullback, a $10,000 investment that would have generated $750 in annual dividends will now earn $1,100 each year.

If you are looking for more high yielding investments, there’s an investment that I like to call “Private Banks.” There’s a group of Private Banks yielding four times more than the S&P and 36 times more than a CD. Best of all, you can invest in them with your existing brokerage account, with as little as $100. Find out how to get started by clicking here.