We prove that any link admitting a diagram with a single negative crossing is strongly quasipositive. This answers a question of Stoimenows in the (strong) positive. As a second main result, we give simple and complete characterizations of link diagrams with quasipositive canonical surface (the surface produced by Seiferts algorithm). As applications, we determine which prime knots up to 13 crossings are strongly quasipositive, and we confirm the following conjecture for knots that have a canonical surface realizing their genus: a knot is strongly quasipositive if and only if the Bennequin inequality is an equality.
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