If the start of the New Year has you thinking about investing for the first time, scrapping your old portfolio and starting from scratch, or simply rebalancing your holdings and filling some gaps the Dividend Aristocrats could be a valuable place to look for candidates to identify longer-term holdings.

The Dividend Aristocrats is a list of companies that have increased their dividend payout for at least 25 consecutive years.

According to S&P, over the last 80 years the dividend component accounts for 44% of the total return of the S&P500 Index. For long-term investors, if you're ignoring dividends then you're leaving nearly half of all potential returns on the table. This should emphasize the importance of identifying and owning solid dividend paying management teams. Not only is it critical to your total return to find companies currently paying a dividend but you want to ensure that dividend is safe, and better yet, will continue to grow. While not a full proof system, frankly the only thing we have to go off of in identifying future dividend growth is a solid track record of past dividend growth. We assume past is prologue.

This is where the Dividend Aristocrats list comes in handy. Think about the tall order that is specified by this list. These are 51 companies that not just maintained their dividend but increased their respective payouts every year dating back to at least 1986 (assuming 2011 was the last year of record for the 2012 list). These companies have honored their dividend policy through the Gulf War, the October 1987 Stockmarket Crash, the Dot-com bubble, September 11th and concomitant recession, and the greatest test since the Great Depression - the 2008/09 Financial Crisis. I would say this is a pretty selective group of companies that takes their dividend policies very seriously.