High-quality dividend stocks can be a great way to tilt the odds in your favor as an investor. After all, companies with a rich tradition of paying dividends tend to sport rock-solid balance sheets, stable free cash flows, and elite management teams. Dividend investing, though, does have a well-documented problem: The vast majority of these equities are expensive relative to non-dividend-paying stocks.

The core reason is that top-shelf dividend stocks generally have a long-standing shareholder base due to the reliability of their payouts. So, on the rare occasion a blue chip dividend stock screams as a bargain, it's always a good idea to understand why.

Keeping with this theme, the global biopharma giants Gilead Sciences (NASDAQ: GILD) and Pfizer (NYSE: PFE) both fall into the bucket of "cheap dividend stocks" based on multiple valuation metrics (price-to-earnings ratio, price-to-sales ratio, earnings yield, etc.), despite offering well-above-average yields on an annualized basis.

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Source Fool.com