Presentation covers all the mechanical aspects of giving a seminar. To achieve a good presentation standard it is not necessary to bring a wide array of electronic equipment to your seminar, though that may be the method you choose. Well-designed and informative overheads accompanied by a good speaking style will be sufficient. In particular, avoid using too many overheads, avoid reading your overheads or from a prepared script, do not put too many words on a overhead, and do not make them too small (the recommended font is 18-point or above), and use diagrams rather than words. Words can be said, but a picture may be able to convey an idea that is hard to explain. It is good to familiarise yourself with the equipment you plan to use and the room in which the seminars will be held. For example, ensure that you know how to put the overheads right way up on the projector. You may find it helpful to model your presentation style on that of your favourite lecturer, but never make the same mistakes your teachers did.
Staff members will ask questions after your seminar, not to try to embarrass you, but rather to investigate how much you really know about your topic. So if you know your material, there is no need to worry about malicious questioners. The seminar also serves as a feedback mechanism on your research methodology. If in your first seminar you are asked a question that you cannot answer, you should investigate the matter thoroughly since you may be hit with the same question in your second seminar.
The major component of the assessment will be technical content of your seminar. You will not be assessed on the quantity of the technical information that you can cram into the allotted time. Rather you will be assessed on your success (or otherwise) in conveying information to the academic staff, who may be entirely ignorant of your subject area. Many department seminars succeed in conveying information to an otherwise ignorant audience, so if you go to a department seminar and feel that you learned a lot, it was a good seminar and you should try to do the same. You should not try to emulate the outrageously difficult seminar where everyone is lost.
On the other hand, you should not make the seminar too easy. A seminar which explains only a few easy things will leave the audience wondering whether you know anything at all. You want to leave the audience feeling they have learned something.
For the first seminar, your primary aims are to explain to the audience what your project is about, why it is important, and what you hope to achieve. You can give some background information on the work which has been done in this area, and explain what ideas you have had and how they fit into the background work. If you have done some work, describe it, but results are not required at this stage.
For the second seminar, you can assume that your audience knows nothing about your topic, except what you told them in your first seminar, which they have probably forgotten. In fact, a good strategy for testing this would be to make sure that another honours student working in a different area can understand the talk. So make sure you include necessary background. Note the word `necessary'. Literature surveys, and examination of possible techniques, should have been done in the first seminar and will not be required this time. Literature and work by other people should be presented only to the extent that it illuminates, necessitates or foreshadows the work that you have done, and even then only briefly.
You must explain what work you have done: what you have achieved, what you have solved, or how you discovered that you could make absolutely no progress at all on the problem. Be aware during presentation of this material that most of the audience will not have experienced these ideas before. So given the audience's knowledge of the topic (i.e., what you just told them), you need to explain what your ideas were, and what you did to implement them.
Finally, your audience wants results. What theorems did you think up, how did you prove them, and what do they mean? What techniques did you invent, how did you implement them, and what results were produced? This is the part of the seminar where you can win the audience, so go all out to impress them. You should explain what you have achieved, and indeed, your whole seminar should have been aimed at making them understand this achievement and why it is so good.
In summary, pretend you are a lecturer and you are teaching a bunch of students about your work. Although they don't know much about your work, they learn quickly, and will be pleased if they understand your seminar and learn things from it. The only difference is that they are marking you.