I took ten minutes to put together an image showing a neat technique for handling walk cycles:
Unfortunately, they deleted their own thread seconds before I could respond.

And for a .gif of this animation cycle in action:

In order to figure out how far the player will move each step, you need to know two things:
The width and height of tiles in your world. How many frames it takes to move from one tile to another.
In my case, each of my animation frames has a duration of 1 frame, and I have 8 of them. It takes 8 frames to move from one tile to another, and my tiles are 16x16.
16 pixels / 8 frames * 1 frame delay = 2 pixels per frame.
That's how I figured out that the pivot foot should move 2 pixels per frame in order for the animation to sync smoothly.
I'll try to use the skeleton method. Thank you for all your help.
How would I go about making the north and south animations?